


Monstrous Company

by dragonofdispair, Rizobact



Series: Unrelated Prompt Responses [77]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood Drinking, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Character Death, Empty!Jazz, Gore, Hunting, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Murder, Mutilation, Necrophilia, Oviposition, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sadism, Sexual Content, Snuff, Sparkeater!Prowl, Tentacles, Tentacletober, Vampires, Violence, soul eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-11-10 19:01:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 50,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20856698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizobact/pseuds/Rizobact
Summary: Two monsters, who know nothing of love, life, or sparks except as things they ultimately cannot help but consume and destroy, still manage to be (un)life partners. Tentacletober.





	1. Tentacle Cuddles

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the same AU as the [Vampire/Sparkeater](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15526128/chapters/36102768) chapter from my (Riz’s) AUgust 2018 compilation. If you haven’t read it (in a while), the salient points are that Jazz and Prowl aren’t good people — or even people at all. See the tags ;) ~Riz
> 
> Finally doing one of these together. And you know that part where Riz doesn’t write fluff when I’m involved? Hang on for a rough (creepy, disgusting, and delightfully horrible) ride. ~ dragon

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“Get those away from me,” Jazz hissed, scrambling over the decrepit couch, knocking it over in the process. Dust and rust and less savory things spilled out of the ruined upholstery, not that any amount of grossness would stop his pursuer. 

He thought about escaping the room. The windows were boarded up. Jazz could have dealt with that, but a mad dash into the street where he’d be noticed was not his idea of a good time. They’d eaten all the other squatters weeks ago, and he’d be easily spotted and identified in the full sunlight. 

“Ack!” He reversed direction quickly as one of Prowl’s tentacles whipped out in front of him, cutting him off. The damned things were  _ fast! _

“Stop running,” Prowl said, sounding almost bored. What little inflection there was in his voice was irritated, and that combination never boded well for Jazz. 

“Um,” Jazz ducked under another creepy as frag, flexible pseudo-limb and scrambled away. He was glad he didn’t need to breathe or else he’d surely be caught trying to run and talk at the same time. Maybe he could make it to the roof? If so, he could jump across the gap without bothering with a mortal disguise. “How about no? Why are you trying to catch me anyway? I ain’t your prey!”

“Of course you’re not. You’re just being annoying.” As if he knew which way Jazz was planning to move, Prowl stepped solidly into his path. “Stop running.”

Oh. Oh no! Well… “Sure, mech.” Jazz jumped straight up, evading a semi-stealth grab at his leg to cling to the edge of the hole in the ceiling, where rust had exposed the now less-than-perfect support beams. Hurriedly, he skittered into a crawlspace where Prowl, with his doorwings and his nasty tentacles, couldn’t follow. 

“Ack!” Jazz kicked at the tentacle that had found its way around his foot.“Let go!”

“No.” 

The tentacle gave a sharp yank accompanied by a sharp, slicing pain. “Ow!” Jazz yelped, scrabbling for purchase to keep from being forcibly dragged from his hiding place. “That was my tire, mech!” 

“Maybe if you’d stop squirming so much it wouldn’t have happened.”

“That is  _ not  _ an apology!”

Two more tentacles wrapped around Jazz’s leg, hooking securely and painfully into his thigh and hip. “I’m not apologizing to you,” Prowl stated, still sounding bored and irritated — maybe a little more irritated than before; if so, it was a change of only a single note in his voice — and not at all like he was threatening to rip Jazz’s leg clean off if he didn’t give up and let himself be dragged out into the open. 

Jazz winced as the sharp blades pointedly pierced armor.

“Come out of there and stop. Moving.” 

“Can’t do both. Pick one.”

A clawed hand burst through the floor/ceiling to clamp around Jazz’s wrist. “You pick,” Prowl said, dangerously close and quiet.

Jazz shivered. He could almost imagine what it would have felt like for his fuel pump to hammer wildly in fear. Or for his spark to spin faster in panic. He struggled, certain he should be feeling fear right now. Who wouldn’t? Prowl was one of the most powerful of Cybertron’s various predators. He was cold. Merciless. Had a special interest in tormenting Jazz in particular. Jazz was absolutely sure that one night it would be Prowl who ripped him apart. Fear  _ should _ be skittering through his frame, turning his fuel to ice.

But Jazz had no fuel. No functional fuel pump. No spark.

He  _ wanted _ to feel the fear. Sometimes he could even fool himself into believing he could. Other times he knew it for the illusion it was.

He gave a token struggle, yanking his hand back to try and dislodge Prowl’s iron grip, then went lax. He stopped moving. Fear or mere illusion of fear, Jazz was not going to die today for whatever had piqued his companion’s temper.

Did talking count as moving? 

“What did I do?” Jazz asked through a grimace as Prowl yanked him none-too-gently out of the crawlspace. 

“I told you. You were being annoying.” The tentacles tightened, pinning Jazz’s arms to his sides before pinning him entirely to Prowl’s side. “You fidget too much.”

“Do not,” Jazz retorted automatically, wiggling to see what kind of range of movement Prowl had left for him. Not much. “I wasn’t fidgeting at all.”

“You were, and I was tired of it.” Prowl walked back to the chair he’d been sitting in when Jazz’s not-fidgeting had apparently become too much for him and settled back into it, arranging Jazz on/beside him in an enveloping mockery of an embrace. 

“Could buy me dinner and a ring first,” Jazz muttered, wiggling. “Bondage ain’t usually pre-conjunx activity.”

“We’re not  _ fragging.” _ Distaste practically dripped from the word. “I am simply holding you still. Aren’t you,” Prowl’s voice turned mocking, “the one who insists that cuddling is  _ calming?” _

“Because it is.” For mortals, anyway. For Jazz, it was just another one of those things he wanted to think he still felt. Wanted to feel so badly he’d lie to more than just himself and Prowl. Sometimes his efforts even worked to comfort his prey, so he knew he was on to something!

He’d just never thought he’d have a reason to test the lie for himself. So was Prowl’s “cuddling” comforting? Soothing? Anything except terrifying and painful where his blades still dug into Jazz’s plating? 

Prowl set one clawed hand on Jazz’s helm and petted the flaking paint of his audial horns. He even gently groomed off a few flakes that had started to itch. It was a little like being petted by a… well, a  _ sparkeater. _ Cold plating and colder EM field. 

Not that Jazz could really feel EM fields anymore. He had no illusions about  _ that. _

“Hmm. It does seem to be keeping you still.”

“Can’t hardly move even if I wanted to,” Jazz grumbled, giving a half-sparked struggle just for formality’s sake. Truth was, no one had ever cuddled Jazz before. The dissonance between what he felt and what he wanted to feel was a little jarring, and not just because he’d  _ never _ expected Prowl to cuddle, well, anything. The concepts didn’t quite match up. 

But, Jazz decided, an Empty had to take his comfort where he could get it. If Prowl really  _ meant _ for this to be soothing… Jazz could be soothed. And maybe stop fidgeting.

For a while.

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	2. Under the Sea

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Prowl ignored Jazz’s whining as he examined the heavy coverstone of the tomb. The life-hungry “mech” did not like having to leave the population centers and hide, and not just because there was no prey out here in the Rust Sea. Leaving behind his vices — the anonymous dance clubs, the drug dens, the brothels — also meant leaving behind any pretense of feeling and life. There was a reason that when hunting  _ organizations _ like the one they’d run from formed, Empties died by the droves. Prowl had even seen periods where the energon drinkers, the flesh eaters, the life cravers nearly went extinct, until their numbers were revitalized by whatever unholy process turned corpses into Empties. 

As a sparkeater, Prowl was immune to life-craving desires. His only interest in prey was their sparks. And he was not about to give up so useful a hunting companion as Jazz to something so inane and silly as a desire to “feel”.

“Whatever you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it. This place’s a dried up, dusty husk. Can’t even hear any turborats,” Jazz pouted, kicking at loose gravel. 

“Go search deeper,” Prowl ordered, just to get the Empty out of the way. It had been a long, fuelless trek through the mostly featureless dunes of the Rust Sea, and Jazz’s plating was already starting to look rather worse for wear. Prowl’s looked dead and grey, of course, but it always looked like that unless he made the effort to look more… alive. “I left some tools here last time I used this waypoint. They may still be here.”

It was a lie, of course. There was nothing here and Prowl knew it. 

Still muttering about how hungry and bored he was, Jazz disappeared down into the tomb. It wasn’t a terribly large complex, but it was large enough that Prowl was able to tune out his noise and focus on the task at hand. If his plan was going to work, he needed to do more than make sure he could close the tomb behind them — he needed to make sure it couldn’t be opened from the inside once it was closed.

Fortunately, the tomb’s original builders had been quite superstitious of their kin reviving as sparkeaters. They’d made their tombs to be sealed. Even now, it was only a little out of its proper place, just enough to allow a single mech to slip through at a time. Even with their heavy equipment, the tomb robbers who’d opened it hadn’t been able to move it more than that. It stayed open because it had been yanked off of the grooved track that had been built for it, to help gravity slide it into place. Prowl just needed to figure out how to get the capstone back into the track. 

In accordance with their (perhaps justified) paranoia, the capstone was too heavy for Prowl to move on his own. He would need to lever it into place. 

Keeping part of his attention on the depths of the tomb to make sure Jazz wasn’t going to return mid-lever, Prowl dredged up truly ancient memories. He was certain he’d seen these tombs being constructed at least once… 

There. That wedge of stone. If he pushed on it, its weight should slide the cover stone into the groove, and from there the whole tomb should close up on its own. 

Last time he hadn’t needed to shut everything up completely, but last time he’d been alone. The only way he was going to be able to keep Jazz contained was to contain them both.

Stone rumbled on stone as he applied himself to the wedge. This would have been easier if he’d fed recently, but short of dragging a prisoner along through the Sea, there was no way to have accomplished it. Jazz probably would have eaten him before they arrived anyway. It took considerable effort to move it, but not so much that he wouldn’t be able to get the job done. Difficult as it was, he was reassured that neither of them would be escaping any time soon.

Slipping through the closing crack as the coverstone slid back into place, Prowl smirked at the ancient statue of Mortilus that watched over this graveyard, supposedly on guard, ready to strike down any of those interred who did not stay at rest. Useless scrap of metal. 

Jazz came bolting back into the entrance chamber as the tomb was sealed again. “Prowl? What—?” Prowl turned and optics sublimely tuned to the darkness saw the Empty as clearly as if he stood in daylight, though not as clearly as if he’d had a spark for Prowl to hone in on. Pity. Flaking paint and decaying plating was cracked and worn around the seams where his normal, unnatural purple light shone through. Despite his inferior nature, he was not a stupid mechanism. He figured out what had happened, what Prowl had done, quickly enough. “No!”

Prowl had been prepared for the Empty to attack him, perhaps in retribution, but instead Jazz flung himself past him to the coverstone. Screeching, he clawed at the entrance as if he could dig his way out though the thick adamantine and prayers preventing just that.

It was useless, but telling him that was also useless. Prowl took the opportunity to pick a spot to wait instead, a spot where he could defend against the attacks that would eventually come until Jazz sank into his hunger past the point of sanity and any interest in him. He chose a spot he’d used before, above the thick doorframe leading deeper into the tomb, behind one of the broken guardians. He could see everything that went on in the entrance room from here, and would be instantly woken should something move the coverstone again. The sarcophagus might have been more comfortable, but it was rather macabre. And it was soundproofed.

He didn’t have to wait long. 

Jazz whirled from the coverstone and with a screech, he clawed his way up onto the guardian statues to try and pounce Prowl. “Why the frag!”

“To wait out the hunters,” Prowl replied, catching Jazz mid-leap with his tentacles and tossing him back against the wall. “Their organization, however well maintained it is now,” and it  _ was,  _ curse them, “will crumble in time. The simplest way to survive their scourge is to hide until that happens.”

Jazz used the wall to push himself to his feet and shook himself, as though he could shake off the dents the impact had left him with. “We could’ve evaded them. We could’ve gone someplace else. We could’ve hid  _ in a city.” _ His blue — blue shading quickly to purple now that there was no reason to control himself — visor regarded Prowl critically. He decided against another attack. For now. “There’s  _ nothing _ here!”

_ “We  _ could not have hidden in a city. You would have gotten yourself killed if we had stayed, and possibly me along with you.”

“You don’t know that!” Jazz practically howled, snatching up a fallen chunk of one of the statues and throwing it at Prowl with enough force to pierce armor and cave in plating. “I’m  _ perfectly capable _ of hiding what I am!”

Prowl deflected the projectile so that it crunched into his shoulder pauldron rather than his chest. “Not for as long as it will take for the hunters and their memory to die.”

“You’re wrong!”

“I am not,” Prowl retorted calmly. “It’s irrelevant now anyway. That stone cannot be moved from the inside.” 

Jazz snarled and scrambled up the wall to try and grab Prowl again. He got a little closer this time, sinking his claws into Prowl’s tentacles when they whipped out to catch him so he was harder to dislodge. A sharp  _ crack!  _ to his helm with an unencumbered tentacle was enough to loosen his grip and fling him away once more.

Patience. It was a good thing Prowl had enough for both of them.

Jazz abandoned his attacks on the entrenched sparkeater then and returned to clawing and digging at the coverstone. He growled and muttered and even threw himself against the solid stone repeatedly before finally settling in a corner to sulk. Prowl did not believe that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t. Over the next several days, Jazz attacked Prowl dozens of times. Prowl endured, watching his control give way to hunger as the Empty’s frame degraded and more and more of the purple light leaked through. Jazz was canny though, and it took longer than Prowl had thought it would for the attacks to become less sophisticated. Even as Jazz was slowly robbed of sense and words, Prowl dared not let down his guard entirely. Not even when Jazz gnawed through his own leg looking for energon in his now-empty lines.

Weeks in, and Jazz was still glaring upward at Prowl whenever he passed him on his circuit through the tomb, looking for weaknesses in the stone. Prowl waited. He was not prey, so if Jazz was noticing him, he still had sense enough to try and kill him.

It took months for Jazz to be reduced fully to a shambling, decrepit corpse. Rusted through. Mindless and searching for nonexistent prey. At last, Prowl could allow himself to go dormant, to escape from his own hunger as the years rolled on into centuries. 

The tomb was still and quiet again, save for the soft scrape of Jazz’s rusted steps as he endlessly patrolled the darkness. Outside the wind howled, covering the ruins in dust.

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	3. Injured Tentacles

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A dingy motel room in an even dingier red light district… Prowl paced the edge of the room, hearing but not listening to the prey’s screams. He’d lured it here with his “innocent victim please rape me” routine, only for Jazz to solidly turn the tables on the would-be predator, pouncing on it from behind as it tried to pressure Prowl, its “victim” into the berth. His pet was in an amorous mood tonight. Which was fine for Prowl; it was good to occasionally — more than occasionally, if he was honest with himself — arrange for Jazz to indulge himself. 

Beneath the screams and the sickening noises of both interfacing and feeding coming from the oversized berth, Prowl concentrated on the rapid, panicked spinning of the prey’s spark. That was the part Prowl wanted. Jazz knew that, knew he wasn’t supposed to drain them to the point that spark guttered, but it didn’t look like he was paying much attention to that just now. Letting Jazz indulge himself was one thing, but Prowl wasn’t about to go hungry for it.

The prey’s struggled slowed, then stopped. The spark would start weakening now.

“Jazz,” Prowl hissed in warning, stepping up behind him and placing a hand on his shoulder. Sometimes all Jazz needed was a reminder…

Jazz let out a possessive hiss and thrust his tongue-like feeding mechanism deeper into the prey’s lines. No, the Empty definitely did not plan to share tonight.

Prowl narrowed his optics and growled. He dug his fingers into shoulder armor to get a good grip. Bladed tentacles slithered out from beneath his plating to wrap around Jazz’s arms and neck so he could bring all his strength (and the threat of those blades) to bear—

With a howl haunting enough to send any mortal in the vicinity running, Jazz let go of his prey and ripped into Prowl instead. Wickedly sharp claws raked down the prehensile limbs, adding the shriek of rending metal to the unholy noise echoing off the walls. Before he could even let out a shout of his own, Prowl’s leverage was gone and the separated segments of Jazz’s jaw had clamped down on one of his tentacles like a vice. A vice with  _ teeth. _

Outrage sparked and Prowl narrowed his optics further. Jazz  _ dared _ to attack  _ him? _ No longer bothering with attempting a delicate, polite grab, Prowl stabbed two more sets of blades right into the Empty’s torso, hooking him like a struggling prey and tearing him away from the berth. Purple fluid, corrupted energon, dripped from the wounds and hissed like acid where it fell on the berth and dying prey. Jazz screeched again and the jaw segments clenched, tearing through the tentacle as he clawed at the others.

No energon or fluids flowed from Prowl’s wounds, and he felt more outrage than pain. He was a  _ sparkeater. _ He was  _ Prowl, _ and he would not yield to a mere Empty!

Jazz wasn’t yielding either though, which was as unusual as it was inconvenient. It was rare for him to persist in his attacks after taking serious damage; his hungers didn’t entirely eclipse his sense of self preservation and he knew Prowl was superior to him in strength. So what was wrong with him tonight?

Jazz’s unhinged jaw opened wider and he stretched out the barbed feeding mechanism. Clawing his way through the tentacles and their blades, he lunged at Prowl again. 

Tired of this, Prowl flexed his limbs and threw Jazz against the wall with a  _ thud. _ Jazz hissed, but didn’t try and move. The purple fluid from his wounds glowed brightly in the dark, splattered all over the bed, the floor, the wall… even over Prowl. 

Since Jazz’s suicidal attack seemed to have abated, Prowl turned his attention back to the prey. He curled his lip in disgust; the mech, the would-be rapist was already dead. Prowl ripped open his chest anyway, hoping there would be just a sliver… nothing. No blue life energy, just a small puddle of purple fluid that had seeped into his frame and pooled in the spark chamber.

“You wasted it,” he spat, spearing Jazz with a cold glare. He would have speared him with more than that, but now that they were no longer entangled he realized that his limbs weren’t responding the way they should be. The damaged tentacles shook as he raised them, and one — the one Jazz had been chewing on — failed to rise at all.

Jazz stirred, pushing himself slowly to his hands and knees. He shook himself, sending more droplets of that fluid spraying over the whole room. “Sorry Prowl,” and he really did sound contrite, though Prowl knew the impossibility of him actually feeling any such thing. But with Jazz and his penchant for self delusion, if he believed he felt something it was almost as good as actually feeling it for real. Prowl watched his jaw segments draw in and close up as his feeding mechanism retracted, leaving him with an almost normal looking mouth and tongue. “Dunno what came over me.”

“It had better not happen again, whatever it was.” Too much of that and he wouldn’t be worth keeping around anymore. “I brought you that meal, and now I’m damaged and hungry.”  _ And it’s your fault  _ went unsaid.

“I know.” Jazz skittered on all fours, his movements profoundly alien compared to his normal smooth gait. “I’m sorry. Want me to bandage them?”

He certainly didn’t want to leave them as they were. The one was in real danger of falling off completely. “Fix what you did,” Prowl demanded, relaxing his stance enough for Jazz to read that he wasn’t going to attack him if he got closer.

Jazz stood, still hunched over like a feral Empty. He cooed in simulated sympathy and yanked wires from the dead mech’s frame to sew up the injuries. Prowl hated to admit that he did it well. Somehow, somewhere, he must have been taught some few medical skills. Or he’d been an artist and woven copper wire to sell at faires. He hadn’t asked about Jazz’s past because he didn’t care, and the Empty hadn’t volunteered anything.

_ “Darkness falls~♪ Bells toll~♪” _ Jazz sang softly, slowly feeling out the words like he’d forgotten them at one point and was only now remembering.  _ “Bright as brass, across the sand~♪” _

The melody was unfamiliar to Prowl, but not unwelcome. It was a pleasant sound, something to focus on besides the prickling pain of Jazz’s repairs, and if it was more distracting than soothing like Jazz probably intended, at least it was proof he really wanted to be sorry about the injuries. That meant he was unlikely to repeat the incident in the near future.

“There,” Jazz said, stroking the worst injury gently. “All better.” He stepped around Prowl, forcing him to step back against the berth or let the Empty behind him… and Prowl still didn’t know what had caused his sudden attack in the first place. Jazz’s continued indulgence in mortal feelings with this show of “affection” wasn’t enough for Prowl to trust him at his back.

“What are you doing?”

“Gonna tuck you in,” Jazz murmured, crowding closer. Close enough to push gently against Prowl’s torso, hinting that he should sit or lay down on the berth. His gaze was unfocused and his motions seemed off, if genuinely meant. “Should rest. I’ll go get you something to eat.”

That would only be fair after the way he’d let their prey’s spark gutter. Prowl frowned at the graying frame in the berth as he lay down next it, deciding it would be easiest to just play along until Jazz stopped acting weird. “Don’t bother bringing back any mechanimals,” he told him, watching his claws suspiciously as he actually did tuck him in beside the corpse. “I need a  _ real  _ spark.”

“Gotcha,” Jazz agreed readily enough, wiping down his plating with a corner of the blanket. He patted Prowl’s helm between the chevron points affectionately, then stroked the corpse’s plating in a similar manner. “Might nibble on it myself before bringing it back, but it’ll be perfectly healthy, I promise.”

“See that it is.”

Jazz nodded and, carefully stepping around the mess he’d made everywhere, slipped out the door to go on the hunt. Prowl sighed as the motel room’s cheap lock clicked behind him. There was no way of knowing how long he would be gone, but whether it was hours or minutes, he could use the chance to rest.

Something stirred in the stillness and darkness. 

At first Prowl didn’t see the source, then with a groan the corpse rolled to get its limbs under it and fell awkwardly off the berth, pulling the blankets with it. “Omph.”

Prowl sighed again.  _ Fantastic. _

_._

_._

_._


	4. Tentacles Save The Day

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Prowl glared at Jazz, offended that the Empty didn’t even notice. The idiot was too busy staring at the dark “spooky” castle ruin their wagon was being dragged into. He’d been staring in that direction ever since they’d entered into the area of the compulsion’s effect. Prowl had noticed when they passed the boundary, dark magic crawling over his plating like a physical thing, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what was affecting his pet, but it was still _ annoying as frag. _ Jazz had stopped speaking two days ago, and hadn’t fussed over his own degrading appearance for a week, both of which were _ very _ unlike him. 

They passed a pair of rusted-through corpses, optics glowing the same purple that leaked from beneath their plating as they clutched shining steel spears with hands that were scarcely more than bare finger struts. Empties, being used as guards. Prowl hoped they weren’t going to try haul this cart up to the top of the ruined tower. That would be just the sort of overdramatic nonsense a dark mage would enjoy, but Prowl was quite sure it wasn’t structurally sound. 

The ragged mercenaries stank of fear and greed. They did not like this job, but they knew what they were doing. The one with the keys hadn’t come within reach of the cage since they’d locked it and Prowl had already tried to break it with no success. It had been built to hold their kind, so all the attempts did was make him look silly.

He probably would have been _ slightly _ less upset by the situation if the mercenaries had been trying to capture a sparkeater, but they’d been after, and thought they had, a _ pair _ of Empties! How could they not tell the difference between him and Jazz? They were _ nothing _alike!

Well. Technically they were both undead horrors that preyed upon the living, but that was the extent of what they had in common. Even a fool should have been able to tell the difference if they had the (incredibly rare) opportunity to observe them both up close without being consumed.

The cart trundled past the tower entrance and into the crumbling courtyard, overgrown with crystal briars. There was light here: a fountain of glowing purple fluid like that which Jazz bled when injured above which floated a purple sphere. The mage… scuttled out from the shadows, optics glowing the same purple, but the glow of his spark was strong and clear. Edible, despite whatever magic or powers he’d been dealing with. If the mage had an alternate form, he’d stripped away the kibble for it, which Prowl vaguely remembered some of those ancient “demons” had demanded of their followers. Monoformers were outcasts, and this one wouldn’t be the first to turn to dark magic and demon worship after being driven out of his enclave.

Runes invoking dark powers to layer him in protections had been inscribed on his plating with glowing green paint, and Prowl almost laughed to realize he could read the long-dead language. They weren’t quite nonsense, as the phrases had been meticulously copied, but if the mage’s copy-and-paste method of spell construction had resulted in anything functional, Prowl would be amazed. 

“Very good,” the mage hissed, peering at the contents of the cage the mercenaries had dragged before him. “These will make a fine addition to my armies. That one,” he nodded to Jazz, whose gaze was fixed on the orb, “even looks strong enough to be a commander. _ Very _ good.”

Armies. He was trying to put together actual armies of the undead. 

He wasn’t going to be very successful if the only undead he could hold in thrall were Empties and he couldn’t tell any better than his underlings when he encountered something that was beyond him. 

Prowl was about to tell him so, to taunt him with his failures, but stopped himself just in time. The mage couldn’t control him, but he was still stuck in this cage, and the mage was now the one holding the key. 

The mercenaries didn’t care about the mage’s ramblings. They held themselves still by sheer will while he praised Jazz’s obvious strength and health compared to his other soldiers. Of course Jazz was healthier: he was a vain, overfed creature who wasn’t happy unless he could mingle with his prey. Even before Prowl had found him, he hadn’t exactly been shambling around the slums or crawling through sewers hoping to pick off the weak, destitute and profoundly stupid. And now that he belonged to Prowl, he had survived purges while the majority of those not so lucky had been driven out into the open by their own hungers and killed. Jazz was a truly ancient specimen of his kind, and he was _ Prowl’s. _

Finally, the mercenaries were paid and fled, and the mage turned his full attention to the two captives.

“Come,” he intoned in an unnecessarily theatrical voice. “Join my legion of undead soldiers!”

The crawling sensation of the magical compulsion intensified, and for the first time in two days, Jazz finally spoke. “As you command, master.”

The mage smirked with satisfaction, then looked at Prowl.

Prowl refused to call this pissant ‘master’ or cede to any of his commands, but he tried to copy Jazz’s vacant fascination with the artifact. He only needed the mage to drop his guard for a moment and come into range. Or better yet, open the cage himself. It would be the last thing the delusional prey did. Maybe, Prowl considered, waiting, he’d even keep the prey alive long enough to share him with Jazz. His pet would enjoy that…

“Hmph. I’ll have to count myself lucky with him,” the mage said, not suspicious of Prowl’s silence in the slightest as he talked at him like he was a dumb mechanimal. “The newly dead aren’t good for much, though I suppose I can always use more cannon fodder. ”

Oh, this prey was going to die _ painfully _ for mistaking Prowl for _ cannon fodder. _ Pride and humiliation burned where his spark hadn’t been for millenia, but he did not break character. _ Come closer… just a step… _

“Bring him,” the mage directed at Jazz. Jazz reached for Prowl’s arm as the mage reached for the lock…

Prowl’s clawed grip closed on his pet’s wrist at the same time three of his bladed tentacles stabbed straight through the open door and through this would-be conqueror's armor. Prowl stretched into his true form, allowing his teeth to lengthen and his optics to glow brighter. He dragged Jazz with him, ignoring his pet’s struggles, as he stepped out of the cage and regarded the prey hanging from his blades.

“I imagine this is quite the surprise,” he cooed to the mage in a voice he’d been informed sounded like the screeching of rusty nails dragged across corroded metal. 

“Gah-hck!” The mage’s optics flared with, yes, surprise, and a gratifying amount of panic. “You’re not—! You’re—!”

“A sparkeater,” Prowl finished for him, twisting his blades through the mech’s internals until he screamed. _ “Not _ an Empty.” He looked up at the orb which had so fascinated Jazz before the prey had started actually using the compulsion. His pet was struggling in his grip, hissing and growling, mindlessly attempting to defend his controller. Fortunately, Prowl had practice holding him, given Jazz’s normal troublesome nature. Prowl was tempted to torture the mech and ask him what would happen if he smashed that orb. He didn’t really expect the mage would tell him, but the torture would be fun. 

He didn’t bother. He had never been a spellcaster himself, but he could _ read, _ and the runes etched on the fountain were clear enough. Besides, Prowl _ wanted _ to smash it. He struck out with a free tentacle and easily knocked it from the levitation magic centered on the fountain, where gravity reasserted itself. 

** _CRASSSSHHHH!!_ **

The orb didn’t shatter when it hit the ground, but it cracked the stone beneath it and developed several fracture lines across its surface upon impact. The mage let out a despairing cry as the power drained out of it, flowing out across the ruins to dissipate. The receding spell left sense in its wake as it released Jazz, who stopped struggling and looked between Prowl and his prey in confusion. “Where’d that come from?”

“You are a weak willed excuse for a creature of the night fit only to be a rotting, disposable minion,” Prowl retorted without answering. “Fortunately for your continued miserable existence, you are _ my _ minion.” He looked down at the mage, struggling weakly still, and smiled, letting his long, segmented tongue flick out to taste the air. “And I caught us something to eat.”

_ Hunger _glowed purple in Jazz’s visor. “Fortunately for you I’m more interested in fuel than being offended by that,” he said, the words lisping toward the end of his sentence as his jaw began to separate as he spoke. 

Prowl dropped Jazz, noting with approval that he landed without wobbling. He only needed the one meal to get back up to his usual, pristine standards of appearance. “No hogging it,” he commanded, twisting his blades inside the mage again just to watch him writhe. “I want my share of this one.”

“No. Nonononononono—”

“Shhh.” Jazz covered the prey’s mouth with a clawed hand, then patted his cheek gently. “That won’t help you. Whatever you did, it reeeeeally fragged off my partner.” He licked at the energon trailing down his frame. “Huh. You taste different.” 

“It's probably been drinking the dark energon from that upwelling,” Prowl gestured to the fountain. “Stop playing with it and hurry up. It’s going to pass out soon from the pain and I want it awake when I rip its spark out. If you don’t want it…”

“I didn’t say _ that,” _Jazz said quickly, digging his claws in to hold onto his meal. The prey let out an agonized moan that spiralled up into a wail when Jazz extended his siphon and thrust it into a prominent line. His claws twitched again and his visor flickered with satisfaction so deep it could almost be called bliss.

Prowl didn’t believe Jazz capable of it, but it’d keep him from causing trouble for a few days while he dealt with whatever pitiful excuse for an army the mage had managed to assemble.

They didn’t need competition for future prey.

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	5. First Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are, hitting the highlights in those tags: rape, snuff, sadism, blood/soul eating, and necrophilia. Be safe.

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The ** _thrum thrum thrum_ ** of the music echoing from downstairs was an annoyance on Prowl’s sensors that he would really prefer doing without, but the hunting ground was good and the room was private. 

Jazz had stopped feeding, just like he had agreed to. The prey was alive, barely, even if he undoubtedly wished Jazz had killed him. Jazz was still _ busy _ though, and Prowl’s lip curled in distaste. 

“Must you really?”

“You said I could take what I wanted. Bit late to be having a problem with it now,” Jazz said, rocking hard enough to rock the berth as well. 

“I meant _ fuel _when I said that. I didn’t expect you to want… this.”

“Why not? I told you I—” Jazz thrust his hips “—want—” punctuating each “—to—” gasping “—feel—” word “—alive!” He let out an obscene moan and shuddered over the body of their prey, a sound that was as much desperation as it was desire. 

The mech might have been the one to pull Jazz into bed, kissing and touching to arouse, but Prowl hadn’t expected it to _ actually _ arouse the Empty. Jazz hadn’t stopped his moaning and thrusting even as he’d plunged his feeding siphon into the mech’s neck and his victim had screamed and thrashed. In fact, the struggles only seemed to arouse Jazz further. 

Now he was too weak to struggle, and it seemed like Jazz was struggling to finish up. “If you keep this up, it’s going to die before I’ve had my turn.” _ And then I’ll rip you limb from limb, _ he silently promised.

“So just take it!” Jazz growled, thrusting faster into the abused, lax frame. “I don’t need his _ chest.” _

He did have a point there. Scoffing, Prowl crawled up onto the berth and pushed Jazz off of the mech’s thorax. It didn’t interrupt Jazz’s rhythm at all. 

The prey was too far gone to respond the way Prowl would have liked as he let his disguise fall away. The single-use temporary paint covering his natural gray pallor chipped and flaked away as his frame lengthened and his tentacles extended, poised to strike above the spark chamber, and all he got was a barely-cognizant flicker in those dimming optics. He was definitely going to have to have words with Jazz about this.

Ahh, but the renewed screaming as he pierced through the mech’s armor, scratchy and weak as it was, sent a frisson of excitement and need through Prowl. Let the Empty have what ran in the mech’s lines; the _ true _ source of life was right here, and it belonged to _ him! _

Prowl ripped the chest plating and most of the mech’s internals away and flung them to the side with a flick of his bladed tentacles. The mech arched beneath them and pushed weakly at Prowl’s frame with his hands, and Jazz _ moaned. _

“Oh yeah. Keep doing that.” The encouragement was husky, desperate. Jazz’s fans labored to draw air into his nonfunctional engine as he grunted in effort. “Just a little more—”

Prowl tuned him out. The call of the spark in front of him was so much more enticing. With no further need to restrain himself, Prowl grabbed the hands pawing ineffectually at him and pinned them to the berth before leaning over the gaping wound he’d created to get his first taste.

The corona caressed him, thick with the fear energy the mech was putting out. Occasionally, Prowl could sip, take the spark little by little over hours, but Jazz’s abuses meant this spark was relatively weak. He’d fall into shock and fade before even a single hour was up. And Prowl was hungry. He opened his mouth wide, so wide, and closed his teeth around the pulsing core almost gently. Streamers of blue light leaked from between his teeth, still connecting the spark to its frame and Prowl yanked his meal free, snapping those tendrils with his sharp teeth. 

“Aaaaaah!”

Prowl swallowed slowly, feeling the pleasant, satisfied burn as the energy settled into his tank for digestion. Not his most fulfilling meal ever, but he judged it a very good start to a partnership.

Awareness of the room crept back into his perception. Jazz must have finished his entertainment; he was laying sprawled out next to, half on top of, the corpse with a loopy grin on his unhinged jaw while his feeding siphon lolled out of his mouth. His spike was still erect, and of course there was no transfluid either on him or between their victim’s legs, but he looked like he’d found some sort of climax. 

“I hope you weren’t planning to lay there all night.”

“Hmmm?” Jazz tilted his head to look at Prowl and streeeeetched, clawed fingers curling in the air as his face rearranged itself so he could talk properly. “‘Course not. That was _ awesome. _I’m gonna get another one!”

“You cannot still be hungry,” Prowl stated incredulously, watching Jazz roll off the berth and stretch again. His frame was limber and gleaming with almost visibly new paint, if still very obviously monstrous. The manic purple light in Jazz’s visor matched that which spilled out from beneath his plating. “Looking like that?”

“I could still eat more,” Jazz insisted, licking the corners of his mouth. “I’m an _ Empty. _ But that’s not the only reason to grab a fresh toy.”

In other words, he wanted to have sex again.

Prowl folded his arms across his chest, stepping in front of the door to block his way. “I would expect even an _ Empty _ of your cognizance to know the dangers of over-hunting and understand the need to _ hide.” _ He gestured to the corpse on the bed, very obviously the victim of a _ sparkeater _ attack, among other abuses. They could stay here, in this room above the club, for maybe two or three weeks more, taking a new victim every few days if they were careful, but no mortal was going to fall into bed with _ that. _ Jazz’s new “toy” would open the door and immediately run out of the room to sound the alarm!

“What, do you think I’m stupid? I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t know how to keep a low profile when I need to. But this is a _ club,” _Jazz stressed, like he thought Prowl was the one who was stupid. “No one’s going to be suspicious of another mech disappearing tonight. If anything, they’ll be less suspicious over two and figure they ran off together.”

“Not when you’re too excited to even hide what you are,” Prowl hissed. He spread his tentacles wide to match the angry flare of his doorwings. _ Threat. _ “Not when we haven’t even had a chance to hide the first victim.”

“Okay, one? Club paint,” Jazz said, gesturing to his glowing plating. “Two, blanket. We just need to arrange the body so it looks like he’s sleeping off a good frag. I _ have _done this before, mech.”

“Not with me you haven’t,” Prowl growled. He was delusional if he thought a mere blanket could cover up the damage he’d done. Half the mech’s torso wasn’t even _ on _ the bed; it was in pieces against the wall where Prowl had flung it. “And I say you will _ stay _ in this room until it’s safe.”

“And when will that be?”

“After we’ve gotten rid of the body,” which would be in the morning at the earliest, taking advantage of those slim hours between when the club closed and sunrise to move it without being seen. “In a few days when it’s safe to kill again.” Prowl tried a compromise, “We’ll bring up two or three next time, and you can have an orgy.” Distasteful as the thought of Jazz fragging was, Prowl wasn’t going to object to the opportunity to further satiate his own hunger.

Jazz didn’t immediately veto the idea, but the amount of restless fidgeting he was doing was enough for Prowl to tell he wasn’t going to go for it. Sure enough, “That doesn’t help me _ now,” _came the plaintive whine. “I’m too revved up to just sit here and wait that long. Not with the music pounding like that, all that energy all around us. I need to feel it!”

“I. Said. No.” Prowl stalked forward, his tentacles moving and curling into an attack position, blades honed in on Jazz. 

The Empty had the sense to shrink back, but his expression remained uncowed. “And I’m saying I’ll go crazy stuck in here with no outlet after a kill like that! Do you have any idea how _ good _that was?”

“You want an _ outlet?” _ Prowl hissed, dropping the last dregs of his mortal guise. Paint flaked off of him like cyberfleas abandoning a drowning dog. He lunged, slamming into Jazz and picking him up easily. They landed with an _ oomph _ on the berth, pressing the corpse into the padding beneath them. Prowl didn’t care. He pinned his newest victim to his previous, holding Jazz’s hands down so his claws could only dig into the less than pristine blankets and not Prowl’s plating. Above them, tentacles and doorwings flared out posessively.

One of Prowl’s tentacles snaked down between Jazz’s legs, prying at the seams of his modesty armor. “Open this, or I’ll rip it off.” 

The sound Jazz made was pathetic, pleading as he shuddered. “You’d really…?” 

“Rip it off?” Prowl’s blades caressed the cold wires around the thin plating. “You know I can.” Chest armor was so much thicker than that around a mech’s interfacing equipment. His blades would go through it like softened grease and a single, strong twist could rip the whole _ assembly _ out.

Jazz’s head fell back with a moan. The panel in question slid aside. “Please!”

Prowl sneered and forced his own panel aside, pressurizing his spike at the same time. He ran his long, prehensile tongue over his serrated teeth and pushed the trio of blades at the end his tentacle into Jazz’s dry valve. “Is this what you want?”

“Nnggahhh!” Jazz shriek/sobbed and writhed beneath him, that same strange arousal from before coloring his cries. “Please!!”

This was the pain and fear he’d _ wanted _ from their victim and which Jazz and his abuses had robbed him of, making the kill less than perfect for him. It was only right that Jazz pay back what he’d stolen. Finally smiling, Prowl thrust the tentacle in to stab the ceiling of Jazz’s valve.

The unholy amount of noise Jazz made while Prowl took out his frustrations on him would have been worrying in another setting, but the ** _thrum thrum thrum_ ** that had bothered Prowl so much before now provided the perfect cover. He could indulge in the delicious screams with no one the wiser, and he _ did. _ And Jazz begged for every scrap! 

When he was done, Jazz wouldn’t even be able to _ think _ about indulging himself with another, too-risky mortal kill tonight. Everything was under control.

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	6. Tentacle Sounding

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Eugh. This one tasted bad too. Jazz was so,  _ so  _ tired of slum dregs! Sure, they were easy prey, but they weren’t healthy enough to  _ do  _ anything with besides eat and what little fuel they had was of questionable quality, thick with impurities or contaminated with drugs. Jazz didn’t mind drugs, but they didn’t affect him when he got them second hand. He couldn’t dance with these slum mechs, or fight with them, or frag them… They were no fun at all.

Prowl, the lucky fragger, was just fine on this fare. A spark was still a spark, no matter how down on his luck the mech carrying it was. And the six or seven they needed a night kept  _ him _ nicely overfed, while Jazz could barely keep the color on his plating. 

He tossed the nearly empty frame aside to let Prowl finish it off. Bleh. 

Still, he did his job and guarded Prowl while he ripped open the frame to take the spark. They were just on the street right now. They were killing too many to bother taking them back to a single, secure hotel room or apartment, not that there  _ were _ any real buildings in this slum, and so the usual dangers abounded. Vengeful mortals, gangs and street fights, stray hunters, the occasional too-desperate mechanimal… In addition to all of those, there were packs of stray empties even worse off than Jazz was. Reduced to their basest instincts and desires, frames rusted through as they shambled from one place to another, drawn by the scent of blood. No life at all. Jazz was  _ not _ going to be reduced to that! So he needed to keep his partner safe. 

“Something’s coming,” he warned Prowl when he heard the uneven shuffle of approaching footsteps. The scent of energon followed quickly after, and he amended, “Someone’s coming. Smells and sounds hurt.”

“How lucky,” Prowl said mildly. He tossed the corpse aside, into the piles of trash that lined the crumbling streets. “Get into position,” he commanded, melting into the shadows of the alley. 

Jazz curled his lip. Prowl wanted Jazz to chase the mech into the alley where he could pounce on him. It was better than running down his prey himself, but he would have  _ liked _ to be the one to pounce! Pouncing — especially pouncing right after feeding, like now — was fun, and he could maybe have sex with at least one of his orifaces before handing the dying mech off to Prowl. Sometimes, though, when he wouldn’t let Jazz do the pouncing, Prowl would eat the mech’s spark first, leaving Jazz no time at all to indulge himself before the life drained out of the energon and it was worthless. Then all Jazz could do was rut with the frame or try and pounce Prowl.

Pouncing Prowl did not often turn out well. 

As he got into position and the prey came into view, Jazz saw that it was in really bad shape. Energon leaked from several places all over its frame from beneath crumpled and misaligned armor, some of which was obviously impeding normal movement. Geez. Had he had a run-in with something recently, or just fallen off a building? Both were possible. Still, the sound and sight of the mech’s frame, the scent of the energon in and dripping out of his lines summoned a  _ longing _ in Jazz. He wanted. He wanted so  _ badly… _ Just a taste of the mech’s life… 

He didn’t realize that he’d let his jaw unhinge and his siphon reach toward the frame like it had a mind of its own until he stepped out of the shadows and the mech screamed.

“Focus!” 

Prowl’s sharp hiss was entirely unnecessary in Jazz’s opinion. He already knew he’d messed up, thank you very much! But the prey was in no condition to escape him. Even sudden fear for his life couldn’t overcome his injuries and he stumbled as he tried to turn and run.

Screw chasing him to Prowl. Jazz  _ pounced! _

The mech scrambled away and Jazz ended up body checking him around the waist. It wasn’t an ideal position to frag him, but his stolen energon still sang in excitement as he latched on with his wide open jaw segments. Teeth and rows of hooks sank into unhealthy plating. Usually Jazz tried to go for an exposed line, but they were wrestling around so, with the mech hitting Jazz weakly around the head and shoulders, that he didn’t dare let go. Instead, Jazz sank his own claws into whatever he could reach and bit down harder. Prowl might have those fancy, sharp blades, but Jazz’s jaws could saw through plating just fine!

He just wished he could frag the mech a little while he was still active enough for it to be fun, but the energon was what mattered.  _ That _ was what was going to fill up Jazz’s tank and really take the edge off of the interminable  _ emptiness _ that dominated his existence. 

The mech’s line pressure was so poor thanks to all the leaks that the fuel didn’t flow readily into Jazz’s siphon when he finally reached a line to tap. Jazz did his best to dig his barbs into the line to form a seal and sucked hard, drawing everything he could into his systems. The energon tasted of dust and rust and  _ life,  _ sweet against the sourness of whatever the mech’s injuries had introduced into his circulation. 

A clawed hand fell on Jazz’s shoulder, crunching into his woefully less than pristine armor. “You’re going to pay for that,” Prowl hissed menacingly.

“Fwwahhgohhf,” Jazz replied, sucking even harder to get every last drop before Prowl inevitably (unfairly!) ripped him away from his meal. If he could just get one more mouthful— “Hggck!”

As expected, Prowl yanked him off the prey and effortlessly tossed him across the alley. Jazz hardly registered the familiar assault compared to the entirely new and  _ extremely  _ unpleasant feeling of something solid lodged partway down his siphon. What the frag was it?! It hurt!

He didn’t even notice Prowl finishing up, ripping the mech apart and tossing the corpse aside. He was too busy trying to  _ getitout! _ Prodding at his siphon with his fingers narrowed down where the thing was stuck, but didn’t actually help in any way. He tried to create an outward pressure to dislodge it, but the siphon could only suck fluid in; it couldn’t push it back out. Bad design that. Jazz whined. Ow. Owowowowowow…

Without warning, the flailing parts of his jaw were caught and effortlessly held in Prowl’s one-handed grip and Jazz was forced to look up at Prowl. The sparkeater had shed any semblance of mortal form. His frame was too long for his armor to cover, and his plating was lifeless, cold, dead, without even a touch of lifelike color. Only the cruel amusement lurking in his gaze hinted at the animus, the spirit, that lurked within. 

“What happened?” he asked, amused and vindictive, and his bladed tentacles poised to stab and shred if Jazz disobeyed again.

“Iohnowww,” Jazz whined, unable to form the words properly. He pointed at the obstruction in his siphon, hoping Prowl would figure it out.

Prowl reached for the siphon and caught it, stretching the long, segmented tube out to examine it. Owow… Jazz wiggled, because that hurt, but the sparkeater’s tentacles shifted menacingly and he stilled. Not worth dying for real over. The four sharp pairs of inner and outer prongs on the end of the siphon twitched nervously in Prowl’s grip.

“You definitely have something stuck in there.” Prowl chortled. “I should just leave it there to teach you that impatience has  _ consequences.” _

“Nn!” Nonononono, please, he had to help him get it out! Jazz reached up to hold onto Prowl’s arms, mutely begging him not to let go.

“Or I could rip the whole assembly out and let you starve,” the sparkeater hissed in his painful, rusted nails on slate voice. “You disobeyed me, pet. You are due punishment for that.”

Okay, so he couldn’t really argue that one, and not just because he wasn’t able to talk with his mouth stuck like this. Still, that was kind of extreme for one little pounce! “Eahutoo’onahahii’eeee,” he tried desperately, the sentence coming out so mangled he doubted Prowl would be able to make out any of it. He liked it when Jazz struggled though, so he kept trying. “Oo’canghurree, eef!”

It seemed to be working because Prowl was starting to look amused again, watching Jazz twitch and try to talk like a somewhat deranged scientist watched rats struggle through his personally-constructed-with-deadly-traps maze. A fully unveiled sparkeater’s mouth wasn’t really designed to smile, or smirk, but Jazz saw it in the shift of platelets around Prowl’s optics. 

Babbling like a moron it was then. 

It hurt, trying to talk with Prowl’s hand closed around his siphon and the obstruction blocking it. Jazz didn’t let that stop him. Knowing Prowl, he was enjoying how it hurt him as much as the incomprehensible sounds amused him. Jazz used that, playing up his pain and misery as much as possible without doing anything Prowl could construe as him trying to “escape” his punishment. 

Because he wasn’t escaping punishment. Prowl enjoyed punishing him, sometimes for no reason. So there was no point. But if he was amused by Jazz’s misfortune he — probably — would be inclined to help. 

“Fine,” Prowl finally stopped him mid-babble. He definitely sounded amused, almost laughing, which was pretty disturbing on his fully sparkeater-ed face. “Just stop your pathetic whining.” His grip on both Jazz’s jaw segments and his siphon tightened painfully, claws digging into the metal. His bladed tentacles advanced ominously. “And hold still.”

Suddenly Jazz was a lot less sure of wanting Prowl’s help. He forced down another whine, visor flickering off then on then off again as he tried to decide whether it would be worse if he couldn’t see what Prowl was doing or if he watched. 

One of the longer (and thank Primus,  _ thinner) _ of Prowl’s blades touched the entrance of Jazz’s siphon. The two sets of barbs that helped the tongue-like appendage actually attach to his prey’s energon lines  _ clickity-clacked _ against the much larger knife, flexing in panic. Then Prowl slowly pushed the blade down, into the siphon. 

It didn’t hurt, not at first. Prowl was going slowly, being careful. Jazz trembled, not trusting it to last. Prowl’s punishments weren’t consistent or proportionate, but they  _ always  _ hurt. The only questions were  _ when, where,  _ and  _ how much? _

The narrow entrance of Jazz’s siphon hit the wide point of the blade and Prowl sliced through it like it was made of cellophane. Gleefully, Prowl opened up a slit down the length of the segmented tube.

Keening wasn’t whining. Jazz would maintain that as soon as he was free to do so, because there was no way he could hang there in Prowl’s hands while he lacerated him  _ there  _ and not make  _ some  _ noise! He probably struggled too, or even clawed at Prowl’s hands, trying to get  _ away, _ but if so he wasn’t aware of it. Everything in Jazz’s body, every perception, had narrowed down to that one source of excruciating pain.

It was terrible and Jazz wanted it to stop! It was misery, anguish, trauma… and part of Jazz wanted Prowl to keep it up forever.

There was nothing quite like flirting with death for feeling alive.

At long last, Prowl’s blade finally reached the obstruction. Jazz thought he would stop there, but no; instead of plucking it out with his claws, he pressed the blade into it, shoving it deeper into his siphon and lengthening the cut along the side of the appendage until he got it firmly lodged in the foregin object — and then slowly dragged it back. The sliver of metal, piece of armor, whatever it was, fell out of the large cut, but Prowl dragged the tip of the blade down the full length of Jazz’s siphon until it could come “out” where it had gone in, a parody of carefulness.

“How’s that?” Prowl cooed cruelly, releasing his grip on Jazz’s jaw and siphon. “Feel better?”

“Nooh,” Jazz said with only marginally better clarity. He hurt even worse now than when Prowl had started, and despite the obstruction being gone he still couldn’t close up his jaw. He could retract his siphon a little bit, but the damaged portion hurt too much to compress like that, not to mention it wouldn’t heal properly that way. Jazz curled in on himself, shaking with sensation. It wasn’t the first time Prowl had maimed him in some way, but none of those had  _ hurt _ quite so much.

“Tough,” Prowl snarled, grabbing Jazz by the shoulder and throwing him into the nearby wall. Automatically, knowing it was coming, Jazz opened his valve cover even as he yelped from the blinding pain. His vision whited out and he screeched, clawing at the wall as Prowl’s spike was shoved into his unwet, unready valve. “Let’s see you steal my kills after I’ve broken a few struts.”

Jazz screamed again, resigning himself to weeks of subsisting on Prowl’s leftovers while he healed.

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	7. "How Many Of Those Are There?"

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The local affinity for steelsilk cloaks to keep off the dust was very convenient. Prowl had not had so much as a touch-up since they had begun their hike to this new “Refuge for Free Thinkers who wish to Engage Their Minds without the Oppression of Primus’ Guiding Light!” and as a result his paint was looking more than a little worse for wear. Jazz’s was better, but only because his did not fade until hunger started causing him to rust. 

The four mechs who’d begun this journey with them had not lived to see the newly repaired stone towers that marked its end. Unfortunately, there were just  _ so many _ things that could befall an unwary traveller in these relatively uncivilized ages. Wild mechanimals, avalanches, disease, poisonous crystal flora that only promised a sweet meal of energon… hunger. It was just tragic.

Approaching the rebuilt ruins, Prowl was vastly amused by the sight. What had been built as a religious center, dedicated to divining prophecies from the stars, was now a safe haven for those who rejected Primus. There were soldiers in the ascetic’s dormitory. It looked like the main courtyard was being used as a  _ market. _

“Something funny?” Jazz asked, completely missing the irony. Old as he was, he wasn’t old enough to understand.

Usually Prowl would have just told Jazz to shut the frag up, but right now he was feeling indulgent. “The people who built this place would have hated to see it now.” He nodded to a construction site where the new residents were repairing one of the empty prayer halls. Repairing, but, “They’re even paving over the prayers etched on the walls.” Finishing what time, sand and wind had begun.

Jazz smirked. “Not very smart of them. Don’t think I’ll tell them though.”

“Neither will I.” Having no reason to except that he knew Jazz would appreciate the gesture and it would keep him from wandering off to explore, Prowl reached out from beneath his cloak and ran his hand from the Empty’s shoulder down his back. “Stick close though. The prayers aren’t all gone.” And these could be especially nasty to the risen dead, and possibly to Prowl in particular, given how obsessed the people had been about the afterlife. Even now, millenia later, more than half of all the spells used to raise, control or destroy the undead built off the foundations these mechs had first laid down. 

As expected, the “affectionate” gesture had Jazz smiling and sticking to his side as they entered the settlement. His head kept turning back and forth as he tried to see everything at once, but he didn’t dart off on his own. 

They hadn’t gone far when one of the mechs on the construction site put down his tools and approached them. “Welcome, travellers. Have you come seeking refuge?”

“We have, sir,” Jazz answered with a deceivingly sunny smile. “It’s been a very long journey.”

“Long and difficult,” the mech agreed, returning Jazz’s smile as he gestured behind him, “but the end is worth it. You’ve arrived just in time for the evening meal. Please, join us in the communal hall. We were just getting ready to head over ourselves.”

“Awesome.” Jazz glanced at Prowl, following the mech. “We’re  _ all _ for communal meals. How about music? Dancing? Anything fun?”

“I’m afraid we can’t offer the same variety of entertainments as the cities, but we do our best! One of our more recent arrivals is a musician and has taken it upon himself to arrange weekly events in the evenings. I’ll introduce you,” the mech offered, leading the way to what clearly had once been the main church.

The mech reached out to touch one of the faded carvings as he entered, and Prowl caught Jazz’s hand before he could copy the gesture. 

Apart from the need to step carefully around every other tile, Prowl immensely enjoyed the sight that greeted them inside the main hall. Assuming any of the original furnishings had been left to do so, these mechs had pulled out the pews and altar. In their place was now a long serving table and clusters of simple tables and chairs, and fibrous straw had been spread across the ground to absorb spills. The dias had been turned into a stage. Hearths had been installed in alcoves that had once sheltered gold and platinum statues. 

Jazz continued to chatter with their new friend as they waited in the queue for fuel, which was served from large pots in simple bowls the way it was in alms houses in some of the large cities that actually bothered feeding their poor. Prowl collected both their servings when it was their turn so Jazz couldn’t spill any of it with his animated gesturing. It was decent enough quality, but it held absolutely no interest for Prowl.

He ignored Jazz and his new “friend” as they were introduced to a table, feigning absorption in the fuel. Prowl actually loathed communal dining, at least when there were too many mechs to kill off all at once like there were here. No matter  _ how _ much it tickled to think of hosting a massacre inside the temple. Not his first, but they took planning. 

Instead he concentrated on dumping spoonfuls of his fuel into the reeds and picking a moment when he could switch both his and Jazz’s bowls for someone else’s at the table, creating the illusion that they were eating. Look! Their bowls were empty!

As it turned out, the communal hall was for more than sharing meals and hosting events. “Please stay here tonight,” the mech (who’d given a name at some point but Prowl hadn’t bothered to remember it) insisted. “The hall is open to anyone who hasn’t chosen a dwelling yet. There’s plenty of space, so don’t feel you need to rush your decision either. Take time to look around and get a feel for the place before you pick a site.”

“Thank you,” Jazz said while Prowl grunted. “We’ll be sure to do that!” They clasped their forearms together in farewell. 

“Please tell me we’re getting out of here ASAP,” Jazz muttered once the mech was gone. 

The hall had emptied out quickly after the meal, and it looked like there were ten or fifteen mechs and femmes staying here. Prowl thought about eating them, but set the idea aside as too risky, for now. If all the other travelers disappeared, they’d be suspected immediately. “Of course we are,” Prowl answered shortly. If he wasn’t going to defile this place, he wanted out of it and away from the itch and burn of etched prayers  _ now. _

Besides, he was hungry, and Jazz was undoubtedly hungrier.

Together they retreated back outside, evading the tiles still capable of hurting them. The sky had begun to darken, lengthening the shadows between the hodge-podge of repaired, semi-repaired, and broken down buildings. Not prime hunting time yet, but it would be soon, and Prowl could see plenty of potential for ambushes.

“Smallish place like this’ll be harder to vanish people,” Jazz said, stating the obvious as well as complaining about the lack of opportunity for  _ his  _ favorite kind of hunting. “Everyone knows each other.”

“We may have to take a few days to note who has a penchant for wandering off,” Prowl murmured, watching mechs hurry into their repaired dwellings. “Stage accidents. And you will have to forgo your usual  _ habits _ until we’ve picked a good, soundproof dwelling.” In such a small, quiet community, neighbors would come running if they heard someone screaming. “After we’ve been here a while, and established ourselves, we can start staging some home invasions where you can play.”

“Bleh. Waiting sucks. Are you sure we couldn’t’ve gone somewhere else?”

Prowl just glared at Jazz. In truth, they were fleeing the country’s oppressive and pervasive religious government as much as these refugees were. There were other, similar settlements all along the edge of the Rust Sea, though this was probably the only one using the ruins, its inhabitants attracted to the ancient observatory. Once those other colonies expanded, or even pushed out into the Sea itself, and trade routes were established, it would be much easier to move on. Until then, this settlement was as good as any other,  _ and _ it came with premade, mostly soundproof dwellings. Living in tents for years and working an actual  _ job _ in order to remain above suspicion would be worse.

But he wasn’t required to explain himself to Jazz. The Empty would do as he was told or face the consequences.

A glimmer of irritated purple rose and then faded in Jazz’s blue visor. “Fine, be that way,” he sighed when Prowl said nothing. “Here’s the highlights from Posthaste I know you didn’t pay any attention to: the sciency, academic types are clustered on that side of town,” he pointed, unsurprisingly, in the direction of the observatory before moving on, “and there’s a bit of a congregation of crafters and tradesmechs over there. I got the distinct impression there aren’t really any loners, so it’ll look suspicious if we set up too far away from any of the established areas. Aaaand,” he drew out the word with a wicked grin, “there’s a curfew. Turns out there was an ‘unholy abomination’ in one of the cellars they opened up recently.”

“You don’t say?” Prowl said dryly. Because  _ that _ had never happened before in these old ruins. “A cellar or a tomb?” As if he couldn’t guess.

“Posthaste called it a cellar, but he calls the church a community hall too. It probably  _ was  _ a tomb before they went and opened it up.”

“Well,” Prowl looked around again, taking in the setting sun and the now empty streets. A curfew. That was inconvenient. “Let’s see if we can find someplace suitable,” relatively sound proofed, without too many prayers carved into the walls to avoid, and preferably with a basement where they could store bodies until they had the chance to dispose of them, “not too far away from the clusters.” He gave it a moment’s thought. “We’ll try near the academics first.” Given the presence of the observatory, if any of the residents were going to regularly violate the curfew, it was probably going to be them.

They wound up fielding far more friendly welcomes and offers to help them than Prowl cared for, but Jazz was good for running interference. The Empty could come across as remarkably normal when he wanted to as long as he stayed fed. If he didn’t, his mind would start to deteriorate along with his paint, making him less useful and harder to control. Of course being well fed and capable of thinking of things besides food and fucking (in that order) still didn’t make Jazz easy to control, but having an actual personality to torment at least made punishing mistakes and disobedience more fun.

Prowl took his time examining each of the ruined buildings while Jazz chatted. Some had been repaired a bit, but most had been left untouched for newcomers to claim and renovate as they willed. 

Curfew approached and Prowl widened his criteria, just looking for someplace relatively prayer-free for them to bed down for the night. They could concentrate on finding a better place tomorrow, but they  _ weren’t _ going back to that church tonight!

A suitable place finally turned up as the last of the sun’s light sank behind the Sea. Jazz bid their nearest neighbor goodnight as he and they slipped inside behind closed doors — or at least a discarded piece of sheet metal large enough to block the empty doorway, in their case. The building was in pretty rough shape, but it had one room with a (nearly) complete roof and only minimal prayerwork to contend with.

Nothing in the ancient writing specifically targeted sparkeaters, just general, broad spectrum invocations against unnatural unlife, so Prowl was able to start scratching up the remaining two prayers with a stick while Jazz paced the room. 

“I hear something,” the Empty announced and Prowl paused to listen. Footsteps headed toward the observatory. 

“Probably one of the academics decided he didn’t believe in unholy horrors and is going to look at the pretty stars.” Prowl scoffed. “Follow him and see if we can get into the Observatory unobserved.”  _ That _ building definitely fit the criteria of “soundproofed”, and with luck they’d be able to blame the kill on whatever the refugees had released.

“And if we can?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Prowl retorted. “It’s an ideal location for a kill, but we still can’t afford your games just yet.”

“Okay, okay.” Jazz made a face, but didn’t argue as he crept outside to stalk the prey.

He was back inside only a minute later. “Yeeeeeah, it’s not one of the academics,” he said before Prowl could ask. “It’s an ‘unholy abomination’, aka, another Empty.”

Another Empty. Prowl considered. That wasn’t unexpected really, but he’d thought the refugees had perhaps found a flesh-eater or vacant armor. Relatively common, weak and useless creatures which they could easily share a territory with. Another Empty… Best get rid of the competition in such a small community. “Let’s go kill it before it eats more of,” my, “ _ our _ prey.”

“Shouldn’t be hard. The thing looked newly dead to me.”

Newly dead? That didn’t sound like something from an ancient tomb… 

It was easy enough to track the Empty down. All Prowl had to do was follow the sound of shuffling footsteps, winding his way through the broken-down alleys with Jazz at his side until—

“Uh, Prowl? That’s not the one I saw before.”

_ Fantastic. _ “How many of these things are there?” he growled facetiously. Too many, obviously. 

Jazz still answered his question. “I count three so far.” He tapped Prowl’s shoulder and pointed when he turned. “There, see? Thr— okay, four. Four so far.”

Four? Where were they all  _ coming  _ from? The two shambling into view behind them were as newly dead as the one they’d followed, and presumably the one Jazz had seen first. Their plating was thick and colorful, not deteriorated and faded. If it weren’t for the purple glow emanating from their optics and some of their larger seams, they could have been mistaken for living mechs from a distance. Unlike a living mech, however, they showed no interest in either Prowl or Jazz. Occasionally they greeted each other, out of habit Prowl supposed, but their voices were whispery monotones or sibilant hisses from their exposed siphons. Too newly dead to have personalities yet, too starved to hide what they were. The only reason they weren’t breaking into these houses was the invocations layered onto every surface that barred them.

“This place is already infested and they don’t even know it.”

Four of any other kind of undead hardly counted as an infestation, but where there were four Empties, there were bound to be more.

“New plan,” Prowl suggested, letting a bit of his own monstrous nature show through. Bladed tentacles unfurled from his frame, twisting his silhouette into a thing of nightmares. “Let’s go massacre everyone staying in that ‘community hall’, defile what’s left of that church, and find a different hunting ground.”

Jazz licked his lips. Purple light curled at the edges of his smile. “I like that plan.” 

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	8. Tied Up By Tentacles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um... tags. I think sadism, gore and necrophilia are the big ones in this chapter... <strike>also it's not in the tags but sacrilege possibly applies too</strike>

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“I swear it was around here somewhere.” 

Prowl opened his optics at his pet’s voice echoing through the maze of streets, mud buildings, and gardens. Anyone with sense had moved away from their lair weeks ago, even if they didn’t know just what was preying on them. That was fine with Prowl, even if it meant ranging wider, roaming further, in search of prey. Especially prey that satisfied all of Jazz’s cravings, but these were still healthy enough to do so, at least; not like some places. They’d started breaking into homes to kill (and allow Jazz to chase, frag, and otherwise play with) families on the edge of the abandoned zone.

They would have to move soon, but for now, these slum-farmers were easy pickings. 

“Young mech,” a stern, aging voice scolded. “We are investigating this area. You should go home and wait for the results in safety.”

“But there _ is _ a sparkeater!” Jazz insisted loudly, stumbling over a bucket of gardener’s tools, falling, and making a racket that would have woken Prowl from hibernation, much less the light doze he’d fallen into for the day, had he not already been awake. His scent wafted to Prowl’s sensors. Drunk, or at least he’d bathed in enough high grade to convince himself — and whoever he was talking to — he was drunk. Idly, Prowl wondered who he’d eaten to get the money, since he was sleeping on their current stash of local currency. Or maybe he’d just eaten someone passed out outside a cantina. “I saw it!”

“I’m sure you saw plenty of things,” Jazz’s companion said as he helped him up. “Please, go home. You’re hindering our investigation and putting yourself in danger.”

“I think it was over here,” Jazz announced, leading the mech around the hovel toward the neglected garden. Not going “home” at all in the optics of his companion, who was currently being herded into a dead end. 

A _ very _dead end once Prowl got his claws into him. 

Silently, not wanting to spoil the ambush Jazz was setting up (without being told to for once!), Prowl slipped through the cloth door of the hovel and crept around behind them. His first glimpse of their meal-to-be sharpened both his focus and his interest. The mech wasn’t just a member of the neighborhood watch; he was a cleric. The Spark-of-Primus icon he carried was made of gold and diamonds and he was dressed in a cloth robe the same blue mortals perceived sparks to be, his helm was wrapped in a hooded scarf of gold… He even had the white sash that indicated him to be someone of importance. 

Jazz really had outdone himself this time. The chance to take one of Primus’ favored servants, the taste of holiness crushed in his jaws… Even the pain and fear this mech’s cloister would feel when he saw their “brother’s” corpse smote and defiled… Prowl’s mouth started to distend just thinking of it. The only thing better would be leaving the corpse on the altar and eating a few more of the fraternity.

“There’s nothing here now, young mech,” the aging presbyter said kindly to Jazz, who was kicking the dead crystals in frustration. He put his hand on the Empty’s shoulder, the plating obviously sun-warmed enough that the cleric didn’t notice something off. “Come. Let’s go back to the temple. We can have some energon tea and I’ll give you a bed for the night.” _ And send you home when you’re sober, _ he did not add. 

“Alright.” Jazz sulked as he let himself be tugged away from the potted fruit tree he was attacking.

Prowl waited just a second, the longest second of his un-life, for the cleric to turn around completely so that when he stepped out of hiding the mech could truly appreciate the horror that awaited him.

Realization was followed by the slow creep of bleak despair in the mech’s expression. It was everything Prowl could have wanted.

“Stand back,” he commanded, brandishing the Spark-of-Primus and stepping between Prowl and the “innocent” who’d led him here. With his other hand he drew out a flash-bang, a firework, obviously intending to alert the church and the guard to the danger before he died. “Crawler in darkness, unholy one, come no closer! Turn back to the shadows!”

Prowl snarled as the spell caught and held him. He resisted the urge to flee, to hide, but he could not step closer. 

A clawed hand caught and twisted the priest’s arm until the Spark-of-Primus dropped to the ground, and the one holding the firework soon followed. The spell, which required that the holy symbol remain aloft, shattered. “Guess what,” Jazz giggled drunkenly over the priest’s shoulder. His jaw segments unhinged to allow his feeding siphon to extend and caress the so-tempting energon lines at the mech’s throat with the grasping barbs at the end, then retracted. “I found the sparkeater.”

“You!” The cleric’s optics flared in surprise and recognition. “Cursed creature!”

“Very cursed,” Jazz agreed pleasantly, “but I’m not the one you should be the most worried about right now. I brought you dinner, boss! Didn’t even nibble it first!”

“Very good, pet,” Prowl hissed, watching the presbyter writhe in Jazz’s grip. He hadn’t bothered with approximating a mortal’s form in weeks, so he reached out with one of his tentacles as he approached, wrapping it around the prey’s wrists to take the burden of holding him from Jazz. 

“I want to frag him,” Jazz said, rather predictably. “You can eat him first though.” 

“Don’t presume to tell me what I can and cannot do,” Prowl scolded automatically, lashing out with one of his knife-ends at the Empty. Two long gashes appeared on Jazz’s torso, already dripping ichor. He didn’t follow it up with further punishment though; he was just in too good of a mood. He wrapped several more tentacles around the old priest’s frame until he was held _ very _ securely. “Go prepare the berth, then, and I’ll let you frag it.”

Jazz clapped the priest’s shoulder in his excitement. “I’ll see you soon,” he purred before backing off. “Doubt you’ll be seeing me though. I’ll be waiting,” he directed at Prowl as he strolled back to the hut and disappeared inside with a flutter of fabric.

Prowl _ should _ drag the prey back into the hut as well, for privacy, so the energon didn’t curdle before he handed it off to Jazz… but watching this mech struggle, listening to his desperate, ineffective prayers… He didn’t _ want _ to wait. 

“Primus can’t help you now,” Prowl informed him mildly. “He will not be receiving you in the Allspark.” Or whatever version of the peaceful afterlife this generation of mechs believed in. “I will consume you utterly.” He considered his final tentacle, the only one he wasn’t currently using to hold the prey. It was the one he’d slashed Jazz with, and the purple ichor still coated the blades. Oh, he’d just had the most wonderful idea… He let the prey’s gaze fall on the contaminated blades, then caressed his plating. “Then you will rise again. Should I leave you next to your parish?”

The absolute agony on the mech’s face as he whispered, “No, no, Primus, please, no,” over and over and over was beautiful. Prowl laughed at his despair, feeling almost drunk with it the way Jazz had only pretended to be.

Savoring the experience, Prowl stabbed the blades into the mech’s chest armor and twisted, ripping it away and exposing his spark. 

Thrashing in his grip, the cleric screamed.

He saw the purple stains almost crawl off of his metal and into his victim’s and he opened his mouth wider, approximating a smile. That wouldn’t kill him, but the injuries soon would, so Prowl opened his mouth wide to engulf the spark.

The electric burn of it as it tried and failed to preserve itself was always so satisfying. The scream cut off as the last tendril snapped, all life going out of the priest’s frame at once. There was still life in the spark though, frantically spinning as Prowl swallowed.

Mmm. Fantastic. 

He licked his lips and multitude of sharp teeth with his long, segmented tongue as though to pick up any crumbs that might have fallen. He could almost hear the spark still screaming. 

Feeling great, he hauled the corpse into the hut and tossed it onto the bed for Jazz, who pounced on it like a starving dog. He had to move fast to get the energon before the life left it too. 

The wounds Prowl had inflicted were nothing like the neat, relatively small holes Jazz usually left in his victims. He practically bathed in the energon from the mech’s torso as he frantically slurped up the mess. He was getting all sorts of fluids just everywhere, staining the presbyter’s fine garments and ripping them with his claws. The lack of complaints about eating Prowl’s leftovers confirmed that Jazz had managed to feed somewhere while he was out, before bringing this _ gift _ back for Prowl. Usually that would annoy Prowl; the greedy creature wasn’t supposed to go hunting by himself.

Jazz clawed away the modesty panel with a _ skrriiieeeeesht _ of torn metal and thrust his spike into the exposed valve. The sparkeater watched on, silent. The Empty hadn’t finished feeding yet, but it was obvious he was running out of edible energon, digging his siphon deeper into the frame and frantically piercing new lines in search of the final drops while he fragged the corpse. Again, something that would usually annoy Prowl, but for once his pet had actually earned his indulgences.

Perhaps he had even earned a reward to encourage him to do it again.

Prowl wasn’t surprised when Jazz whined, rutting faster and shredding dead plating and cloth in frustration. Sometimes Jazz just couldn’t feel satisfied, couldn’t reach whatever constituted a suitable climax, when his partner didn’t at least start alive. He did it to feel alive, after all. This was the part where Prowl always just watched and sneered and waited to see if the Empty would be desperate enough to try and jump Prowl to get his release (which Prowl _ always _ made him regret). 

Time for that reward, then. Prowl would have prefered if Jazz had found his climax, but this worked too.

Careful not to slice him again with the blades, Prowl wrapped his tentacles around Jazz’s wrists and ankles, binding him, wrist to wrist, foot to foot, to the corpse and nudged his legs apart so he could kneel there. Jazz froze, unsure what was going on. 

“Relax, pet,” Prowl cooed, running his hands over Jazz’s back and sides. “And open up. Let me help you.”

“Help me?” There was suspicion in Jazz’s voice, but he didn’t hesitate to obey. “Help me how?”

Prowl didn’t bother with an answer. He pressurized his own spike and pushed it into Jazz’s waiting valve, which in turn pushed Jazz’s spike back into the corpse’s valve with a sickening _ squelch. _ “You like this, don’t you?” He drew back and thrust in again, for once not deliberately damaging Jazz in the process. “I’ll help you get what you need.”

Jazz’s suspicion evaporated, chased away by a deep, wanting groan. “Yessssss, oh, please, _ yes!” _Trussed up in Prowl’s tentacles and sandwiched between two dead frames, Jazz couldn’t move on his own to set any kind of rhythm, but he could and did tremble where he was trapped. “Help me, please!”

“I will, pet.” Prowl thrust, setting a bruising rhythm that was probably going to leave dents both on (and in) Jazz and his other “partner”. Jazz writhed, moaning again. “I’ll help.” 

_ Just this once. _

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	9. Surprise Tentacles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies, but my schedule is about to go wonky over the next several days so we are definitely going to fall behind by at least a day. Nothing for it. We will finish the prompt list as (hehe) promptly as possible, putting out new stories as close to daily as we can, but we definitely will be finishing in early Nov instead of on Oct 31. ~dragon

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Things went bump in the dark depths of Rodion. Everyone who lived outside the shining inner city towers knew so. They didn’t always _ believe _ so — or at least that was the feeling Ratchet got talking to his patients in the charity clinic — but they _ knew _ so. People disappeared. Ratchet was inclined to think most of the people who disappeared just curled up in their hovels and their hiding holes and gave up, sometimes with a little bit of chemical assistance to help them on their way into oblivion. Sparkeaters, fey, Empties, poltergeists, haunts, alien abductions, metal-eating petrorabbits… they were just stories to frighten the overly imaginative. 

Until his glitchy security cameras caught one of the corpses in his always overflowing morgue as it rolled over, fell off the autopsy table, and shuffled out the door. No matter how many times he watched it, Ratchet couldn’t come up with any other explanation for the corpse literally rising from its slab. There was no way that mech was still alive. No mistakes. No switch ups. That mech had been disemboweled and ripped open right down to the spark. On the video, Ratchet could even _ see _ the massive wounds that had killed him as he got up.

Of course, admitting that something supernatural really was going on didn’t actually _ explain _ anything. Ratchet was a medic; diagnosing the corpse with idiopathic undeath and leaving it there didn’t sit well with him at all. Why had it happened? How had it happened? And, most importantly, was there anything he could have done to _ prevent _it from happening?

The datanet was useless. Maybe there was some real information here, but he had no way of sorting it from the fiction, stories and wild guesses. Some of the most reliable academic sources, like Iacon University or the Altihex research facilities, maintained that the myths were parables and the monsters in them symbolic, a viewpoint Ratchet very much wished he could still agree with! His patients and neighbors weren’t much better, given they only half-believed their own stories at best. Everything they could tell him had been handed down, distorted by exaggeration and omission over time as they were told from one mech to the next. One of them, however, did say something that gave Ratchet an idea of another place he could look. 

Old for a slum mech, Critter was deeply religious. Despite the buildup of incurable sludge in his engine that would choke him to death sooner or later no matter what Ratchet did about it, and which meant he really should _ lay down _ and _ not move, _ he still trekked over to the chapel at the edge of the Dead End to attend services each week. 

“The cursed,” he whispered when Ratchet asked about walking corpses as he made a warding gesture with his hand over his spark. “Servants of Unicron. Or gifts from the Destroyer to those who serve him. I never could figure out which from the sermons.” 

“There is information about them in the sermons though? The church has some understanding of what these creatures are and what can be done about them?”

Critter shrugged, which was _ so helpful. _ “They’re a punishment for our many sins. A plague that will grow unchecked unless we return to Primus’ light…” Ratchet tuned out the rest of the mech’s impromptu sermon. He wasn’t looking for wishy-washy theology. What he wanted was practical information he could act on — for instance, which, if any, of the symbols the church put up around its buildings actually repelled “the cursed”.

“—ould visit the library,” Ratchet’s attention suddenly was yanked back to his patient’s monologue. A library? “There might be more there.” Critter gave the medic a crooked, gap-toothed smile. “I’ve heard the big one in the Towers’ Cathedral is public, not that I could ever get a chance to go.”

Or read anything if he had, Ratchet knew, but stayed silent on the subject of the slums’ ninety-nine percent illiteracy rate. If Critter wanted to pretend it was primarily his failing engine and corroded plating that kept him from venturing into the towers, well, it wasn’t like those _ weren’t _ factors.

“Thank you for the suggestion,” Ratchet told him. Making time in his overworked schedule to go himself wouldn’t be easy, but he would find a way. This was important, even if it did turn out only to be another dead end. 

That being said, it still kept being pushed back, again and again, for weeks until Ratchet nearly forgot about it. Then two more bodies were found. Both had been ripped open down to the spark. The locals didn’t see a point in moving them, but Ratchet insisted, if only to get them out of the sludgy river and away from the cluster of mechs who bedded down right there under the dilapidated bridge. He’d hoped that would be the end of it, but one of them got up and was still banging around the morgue in the morning when Ratchet went to go check on them!

No _ way _ was he opening that door until he’d figured out how to get rid of it!

One of his patients, who was still high (and on suicide watch) despite being pumped full of drug neutralizers, suggested a scattershot rifle, like in vidgame clips of the player shooting hordes of zombies to pieces. Boom! Headshot!

“It’s already up and walking around without a spark. Who’s to say it can’t keep going without its head?”

No one, much less the drugged out mech, had an answer for that.

There was absolutely no more putting it off now though. Despite how busy he was, Ratchet left the clinic in the care of his nurses and went to the damned Cathedral.

A novice greeted him when he arrived, spouting off praise and blessings instead of something _ useful _like directions. Ratchet let him go on just long enough to be rude rather than offensive when he interrupted him and asked him to point him to someone who could actually help him.

He was bounced from one novice to another, all sure that he wanted to go someplace _ else _ like the main worship hall, the meditation gardens, some hallway with bronze busts of dead… someones. Ratchet wasn’t actually sure who they were supposed to be. Five different people! Five different dumb tourist traps! Then, finally, he found someone who took him to the library in the basement. 

“Public computer terminals are along the north wall,” the glossy mech with almost translucent armor told him. “The shelves contain works that have yet to be digitized. These you can peruse if you’re careful with them, but if you need access to the rare records room you’ll have to ask one of the senior Refulgeres.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He probably would have to ask, if only to be sure he’d looked in every nook and cranny of this place so he didn’t have to come back again. He’d start with those terminals though — and be grateful that the computers gave him straight answers.

The chairs were rather comfy, and the small work space the terminal was set into had a divide keeping his (nonexistent) neighbor from peering over at his screen and notes. It actually rather reminded him of doing research at the university library in Iacon. 

_ Undead, _ he typed in as his first search and toggled the button that would keep results confined only to church records rather than initializing a general datanet search.. 

The computer returned dozens of church records. Scanning the abstracts, these looked like the same sort of mythology analysis and essays he’d found coming out of the literature departments of the university. Interesting in their own right, no doubt, but not likely to answer the question of how to destroy the monster locked up in his clinic.

Maybe he needed to be looking for historical events… _ Exorcisms, _he tried next, looking for records of when, where and how the rituals had been performed in the past.

He clicked through a few, mostly more analysis of the stories and legends that featured possession, but scanning the works cited of those he found one primary source from six million years ago that was described as a “handbook” for the “witch hunters” which, apparently, were a semi-official thing back then. It looked like possession was part of that — Ratchet really didn’t want to call them an “organization” — group’s perview, so he looked for a copy of the book.

_ No digital copy available. Ref. No. 556-1BN-669FN08 2.3 1356 _

Reference number. That meant the shelves. Bleh. With his luck it’d probably be in the rare records room too.

Sure enough…

“Excuse me,” he said, trying to get the attention of the first “senior” anything he could find. Settled comfortably behind his desk, the mech was a senior citizen at the very least. His plating was clean and in good repair, but it still showed unmistakable signs of age. “I’m looking for a physical reference.”

The mech looked up slowly and blinked as though surprised to see him there. Optics that needed the assistance of external spectacles took in Ratchet’s appearance from his medical symbols to the lack of faux-crystal armor characteristic of clergy. Slowly he set aside his quill. “Yes?”

“I’m looking for a reference,” Ratchet repeated. “It’s in the rare records room. Are you able to help me find it?”

“I can. Do you have a referral from your teacher? I wasn’t aware there were any mythology courses being taught this quarter…”

“I’m— I’m not a student.” Not anymore, though it hadn’t been all that long ago that he was. “This is work related.”

“I’m sorry. The rare records are not open to the public. They are quite fragile, you see, and irreplaceable.” The mech picked his quill back up and dipped it in the ink. “You will have to come back with a referral.”

_ Damn it. _“Yeah, because a referral to research the undead will be so easy to come by,” Ratchet grumbled under his breath.

The mech gave a tired sigh. “What does a doctor need of old fictions? ‘Quaint’ is the nicest term I’ve heard for the fact that mechs once attributed disease to demons and spirits and the like.”

Ratchet hadn’t meant for him to hear his complaint, but since he had, “I’ve heard it called a lot worse among my colleagues, but I have several patients who put more stock in it than most these days.” The banging of the undead thing in its prison was hard to ignore in the poorly soundproofed clinic, after all, not that he could admit to any such thing without coming off as crazy. “I’m looking for ways I can better help them with their fears. Referring them to a psychiatrist just isn’t feasible.”

The old cleric regarded him for a moment, then flipped his book to the next page and wrote out a title and author. “Here. I don’t know what combination of search terms told you you needed one of the rare books, but this is our modern instruction manual for exorcisms. It should be in the digital database.” He tore out the page and handed it to Ratchet. 

It read _ Rituals in Standard Cybertronian: A Comprehensive Guide By Region _ _ by Prodigy. _

He could certainly start there, but he wasn’t sure a modern text would have anything stronger than a placebo in it. “The book I was looking for was for witch hunters,” Ratchet admitted. He felt ridiculous saying it, but he couldn’t leave without a course of action. “I really need something a little more grounded to deal with—” oh, who could the old coot tell anyway? “—the beyond terminal patient I have in my morgue.”

He chuckled. “I should hope a ‘beyond terminal’ mech was in the morgue. The Church no longer has jurisdiction to conduct funeral pyres.” He sighed. “The privatization of mourning… can you believe there are mechs who are insisting their loved ones be buried rather than burned?” He shook his head.

Burning? “Does fire keep the cursed away?”

The mech paused his writing and slowly set the quill aside again. “Not as such,” he said cautiously. “The ‘cursed’ is a rather large category and most are no more flammable than a living, pious Cybertronian. Some are quite a bit less so. Burning, as a funeral practice, destroys corpses that might otherwise rise again. Why do I suddenly get the feeling you aren’t asking about how to better administer placebo psychiatry to your patients?”

Ratchet sighed. In for a shanix, in for… “I have an undead locked in my morgue,” he forced himself to blurt out plainly. “There’s absolutely _ no _ chance I misdiagnosed it as dead. It’s been ripped open all the way down to the spark, but it still insists on wandering around and banging into tables. I need to know how to get rid of it.”

“Oh dear.” The old priest removed his spectacles and polished at the lenses with a cloth from his subspace. “That is… a problem.”

Ratchet was mostly relieved the mech wasn’t laughing at him. 

“Well, um…” He put his glasses back on and peered through them. “It’s physical? One of the corpses?”

“Yes.” Did that mean he knew what Ratchet was supposed to do?

“And running into the tables, which means it’s not a spellcaster who intended this transformation… You should be able to ‘kill’ it rather easily. Cut off the head — I suggest a scattershot rifle — and then burn every bit of the body.”

That was easy enough. Straightforward. Didn’t involve any esoteric rituals hidden in old books he couldn’t access. 

“The problem,” the priest continued, “is that if your wanderer is an Empty, then anything its ichor touches is then contaminated and must be purified or they will spread in a plaguelike manner.”

“So don’t get the ichor on me?” More difficult than just blowing its head off, but still doable…

“If only it were that simple. When I say anything, I meant _ anything. _ Should you be so careless, you will not rise until after you die, of course, but if it touches any of the corpses in your morgue, they will rise almost immediately. And then, there is anyone who comes into contact with your walls, floor, tables, tools…” he trailed off meaningfully. “All of them are in danger, if your problem is an Empty.”

Erk. Plaguelike indeed. “What are the chances it is?”

“Given how you said the mech died, from being torn open?” Ratchet nodded. “Normally I would say not very. That sounds like a sparkeater’s kill.” _ Sparkeaters were real too!?! _ Fan-fragging-tastic. “But there is an old but persistent legend of a sparkeater — or sometimes a mated pair of them — who is the ‘mother’ of all Empties. It kills and feeds like a normal member of its kind, but it leaves not just newly risen victims, but also contaminated, unhallow places in its wake, from which Empties can spawn for years afterward.”

Ratchet almost scoffed, then stopped himself. It was an old story, sure, and that meant Ratchet was disinclined to believe it on general principles, but he wasn’t going to alienate his one resource for information on this stuff! “Just tell me what I need to do now to deal with the thing in my basement. I’ll worry about a ‘mother’ of them afterwards. One step at a time.”

“Fair enough. One step at a time.” The priest flipped to a new, blank page of his book and picked up his quill. “First, you do need to kill the one that is there causing problems, preferably without contaminating yourself.”

“I have a friend I can borrow a blaster from.” Ironhide would want to know what in hell Ratchet wanted a gun for, and he would have to be careful that whatever story he told his friend didn’t make him sound too under threat or he might have a bodyguard rather than a weapon. It should be doable though. If it wasn’t… well Ratchet would deal with that when it happened.

The priest nodded. He began writing on a new line of his page. “Burn the body. Then you will need to purify the ashes, the death site, and anything that _ might _ have come in contact with it. Don’t think that because you cannot see any visible ichor that it is safe. _ Everything.” _

“How do I do that.” 

“I would go myself,” he sighed, “but I my engine won’t take the strain any longer. You will need to burn everything you can afford to lose and douse the rest with holy oil. I’ll acquire it for you.”

“Thank you,” Ratchet said. 

“May Primus bless and guide your endeavor.” 

Ratchet made a face, but didn’t say anything. If there was anything at all he needed Primus’ blessing for, disposing an undead patient zero without starting a plague of them probably was it. 

“I’m Ratchet.” If he was going to find out why mechs in _ his _ slum area kept getting their sparks ripped out and then rising as undead, he was going to need this mech’s help sorting truth from myth about this “mother” creature. And he was going to need a steady supply of this holy oil too. 

“I’m Alpha Trion, and I’ll help you however I can.”

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	10. Tentacle Massage

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“You should know better than to bring hunters over to eat,” Prowl hissed and Jazz braced himself for the blow. 

“Hey, I didn’t know he was looking for us!” He’d just thought the sparkeater might like eating a pretty Praxan. It had been so long since they had seen any frametype remotely like Prowl… and if that gave Jazz a chance to play with the pretty doorwings and  _ fantasize, _ well… 

To his surprise, Prowl  _ didn’t _ hit him. His weight settled onto Jazz, straddling his hips and pressing him down into the bed. A tentacle ran over the now-healed injury site, blades slicing just far enough to scrape away a layer of paint. Being new, well,  _ “new”, _ metal, there wasn’t a lot of paint to scrape away! “It was your eagerness that got you stabbed,” he pointed out. “If you had just  _ eaten _ him, he wouldn’t have been able to get the knife out.”

“No, he wouldn’t have, but then  _ you  _ wouldn’t have gotten to eat him.” Prowl didn’t like him feeding without him — something about him being too careless when he didn’t have proper supervision (which, really? So unfair!) — so he’d been trying to “behave”. Plus, of course, if he’d just eaten him when and where he’d found him there would have been no chance to enjoy those doorwings… 

“I  _ meant,” _ Prowl growled, flexing his claws painfully into Jazz’s armor, “if you hadn’t insisted on  _ fragging him _ before sticking your siphon into his lines,  _ this” _ one blade from one of the tentacles stabbed into the newly healed plating and Jazz gasped, “wouldn’t have happened.” The tentacle withdrew. “Oops.”

Of course Prowl didn’t apologize. It hadn’t really been an accident.

Jazz didn’t apologize either. “I  _ wanted  _ to frag him! Drinking their energon isn’t enough! It only makes it  _ worse.”  _ And Prowl knew it, frag him! Or not, because Prowl was only sexual when it suited him to be, and he never let Jazz be the one to frag him. Jazz didn’t mind that so much, really. Prowl was an  _ excellent _ frag, leaving Jazz so high on all sorts of pleasure and pain that his vision white screened. But Prowl also—

“I should cripple you again,” Prowl said conversationally.

That. He had a tendency to leave Jazz  _ unable _ to hunt by himself or be “disobedient” when he was done. 

Prowl’s tentacles moved around him, caressing Jazz’s plating and engulfing him. It felt nice, even if Jazz knew there was a very good chance he was about to shred him to bits with a single flex of will.

“You could not cripple me again,” Jazz suggested (suggested! He wasn’t telling Prowl what to do, nossir!). “That’s an option.”

“Hmm…” Tentacles moved. Jazz leaned into the touch. “Maybe if you beg.”

He could do that. He had lots of practice doing that. If nothing else, it would mean getting to enjoy this gentle embrace for a little while longer before Prowl moved on to punishing him. “Please, please don’t cripple me again. Not today, I’ve already been stabbed by a hunter today, whatever you need to do okay but please not that?”

Prowl made an unhealthy-sounding noise from his nonfunctional engine. It was not a sound Jazz heard often, only when the sparkeater was pleased with something other than feeding. His tentacles flexed around Jazz’s body, pushing and pressing at the seams of his armor, but not (yet) stabbing, rending or tearing. “I do think you need to learn a lesson about being… incautious,” he said, almost teasing. 

He liked hurting Jazz.

“I can learn without being crippled, I promise!” Jazz didn’t like being hurt, exactly, but when it was Prowl… There was always the chance, the risk, that he would decide that this was the last time. It would be more of a thrill if he’d just eaten, but even without fresh life in his lines the danger of the situation had the echoes of the emotions Jazz wanted to feel again so badly ringing louder in his head. Not fear the way he remembered fear feeling, but close enough that he wanted more. “Please believe me, I’m totally serious!”

“I don’t believe you,” Prowl answered flatly. “Past experience suggests you  _ don’t _ learn. If I didn’t need you intact…” Jazz felt the blades scratch against his plating, nicking and gouging armor. Jazz moaned softly. Prowl was going to do it, going to dig into him and hurt him and maybe frag him and even now that he was on the  _ cusp _ of being torn apart, the glide of Prowl’s tentacles and the pressure of the non-bladed parts against him felt  _ good. _

“I’m much more useful intact! I’ll be incredibly useful if you don’t cripple me and I  _ do  _ learn, I do,” Jazz insisted, attempting to defend himself even though it was probably the worst possible time for that. “I just can’t always remember when I get caught up in the hunger and by the time I do remember it’s too late. It’s not on purpose, please.”

“I don’t hear begging.”

Right, he really needed to get back to that so Prowl wouldn’t eviscerate him. Yet. He was surprised he hadn’t already, actually. Prowl seemed to be in an uncommonly good mood, despite the nasty surprise when dinner tried to bite back. Normally he wasn’t this indulgent. “Pleeeeease, no, don’t cripple me, pleasepleaseplease I can’t go through that again!”

Prowl let out a pleased chuckle. “Loosen your armor, pet. You’re a little tense,” he mocked.

_ Gee, I wonder why that could be.  _ Snarky comebacks weren’t begging though, so Jazz kept the thought to himself and willed his armor to loosen despite all his self-preservation instincts screaming at him to do the opposite. “Please, I’ll be good just don’t cripple me.”

Loops of Prowl’s tentacles pushed into the gaps between Jazz’s armor, still without bringing the blades into play. The pressure of  _ being invaded _ almost made Jazz tense again, but if he snapped his armor down on one of those and Prowl decided Jazz had hurt him on purpose… No amount of begging would hold off the damage. Jazz would be left a drooling, bedridden excuse of an Empty, forced to take spoonfuls of energon from Prowl’s hands while he laughed at him. Or dead. Dead was an option. So no. No clamping down on Prowl’s tentacles, even if it wasn’t exactly pleasant to sit here and let the sparkeater explore him like this.

It wasn’t exactly unpleasant either. 

“You said I could do  _ anything _ else…” Prowl reminded, sing-song. “Open your panel too.”

Okay,  _ now  _ he was going to start shredding him. Right? Jazz whimpered (just a little!) as he obeyed again. “Anything else, please, please, anything else. I just want to be able to hunt.” To dance. To frag.

Prowl shooshed him. “You will. I won’t break anything this time. I feel just dreadful,” he lied, “that you took that injury. Don’t think I don’t know why you chose a Praxan. You are far too ruled by your lusts. So what was it? The chevron? The doorwings? Which part of me were you fantasizing about, pet?”

That was entrapment. Jazz answered anyway. “Doorwings,” he mumbled, his gaze drawn to Prowl’s now. “But I know better, I know I can’t— please, I know I deserve to be punished for that but please leave me able to hunt!”

“I don’t appreciate being fantasized about like I’m one of your prey,” Prowl hissed, and Jazz felt his claws punch right through his armor like it was paper. “But I’m not mad,” he lied again. “I’m going to indulge you a little bit.” Prowl’s spike slid roughly into Jazz’s valve. Expecting it (and actually still surprised that Prowl didn’t thrust hard enough to tear the dry lining and crack his victim’s hip and spinal struts), Jazz didn’t focus on the pain but on the sudden spike of pleasure of being fragged. He arched up with a gasp. “Put your hands on my doorwings. Pet them a little.”

What?

He wanted him to  _ what? _

Jazz trembled. “Pleasepleasepleaseplease…” Please let him touch them! It would be so much more like Prowl to slice his hands off for such presumption no matter what he’d said, but Jazz couldn’t  _ not.  _ Not when he wanted so much, when there was a  _ chance!  _ “Please, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, don’t cripple me!” he begged as he reached toward Prowl’s doors. The tentacles loosely wrapped around his arms and pressing into the seams around his armor moved with him, a comfort and a threat. 

Jazz felt it almost like a physical shock when his fingers touched Prowl’s nearer door. He wasn’t bleeding anywhere? Well, except from a few cuts where Prowl had been “careless” with his blades before, and those punctures where Prowl’s claws had breached his armor, but he was touching Prowl’s doors and  _ he still had his hands! _

Above him, Prowl smirked like he knew exactly what Jazz was thinking. 

Was he really, truly going to get to pet them?

Still begging, still shaking, Jazz dared to move his hands along the curve of Prowl’s doors.

The grey plating was satiny, smooth. Like the cutting edges of his blades, only without the constant threat of being shredded. Prowl watched him, the smirk falling off his face and into a rather neutral expression as he let Jazz’s hands wander while he fragged him. 

Best. Day.  _ Ever! _

“When we’re done here,” Prowl added conversationally, almost bored. “I’m going to open you up and rearrange your insides.”

Jazz paused, considered that… Considered that it was  _ later _ and right  _ now _ he was still  _ petting Prowl’s doors _ while the sparkeater pleasured him… 

Yeah. Still the best day ever. 

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	11. Tentacle Porn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: There’s really only one way Prowl’s tentacles can frag anything, and that’s painfully. Gore ahead. Read on with care.

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Mortals didn’t like getting fragged like this.

Well. Jazz assumed they wouldn’t like it given the way most of his prey reacted to how he usually fragged them, and what Prowl did to him was waaaaay worse. Jazz only sort-of-kind-of-more-than-he-probably-should liked getting fragged like this himself! But Prowl would never actually frag one of them, so assuming was as good as knowing. 

Jazz wasn’t sure why that was even important. He had plenty of other things to focus on right now. The bruising thrusts, the shocks of pain that went through his cracked pelvic and spinal struts every time Prowl moved, the  _ almost there _ feeling of real, true climax… 

Prowl pulled out with an impatient, bored huff and closed up his spike panel. 

“Noooo, nonono don’t stop! Please don’t stop  _ now,”  _ Jazz cried, desperate for that final high. “Please!”

“This is pointless,” Prowl said, wiping off his plating. There was no transfluid or lubricant, but there was some leftover stickiness from their latest victim. “It’s not doing anything.”

“It is!” Not for Prowl, because it never did anything for Prowl, but for Jazz— “I was so close, just a little bit more—”

Prowl scoffed. “I’m not sticking my spike back in you again tonight. Use a broom handle or something.”

“Oh, right, cuz a broom handle will be enough to finish things when even  _ you  _ couldn’t do the job.”

Inhuman yellow optics narrowed and Prowl’s doorwings twitched, showing the insulted pride he otherwise hid. “I don’t care,” he lied.

“Then I’m sure you won’t care when it takes me aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall night trying with everything else in this room,” Jazz taunted. “Loudly.” 

“You are trying to annoy me,” the sparkeater stated, his grey plating shifting and his tentacles fanning out behind him. 

Why yes, yes he was, and it was a damned stupid thing to do too. Suicidal, even, some might call it. Jazz didn’t care. He’d just finished an absolutely fantastic meal in the form of a well-fueled convoy class mech and was buzzing so hard with all the energy it had given him he was going to explode if he couldn’t find some form of release! Getting to overload (or come as close to a true overload as he was capable of) had been his first choice, but their prey had been too large to use satisfactorily in that regard and Prowl was being a pain in the aft — or not, since the sharp, bright pain had dulled when he stopped slamming into him and aggravating his injuries.

“Is it working?” Jazz asked with his best devil may care grin. If he couldn’t get off on pleasure, he could at least get off on pain.

Prowl glared. His tentacles twitched and Jazz  _ knew _ that it was working even though Prowl didn’t like being manipulated. Lucky for Jazz, Prowl generally attacked things (Jazz) when he didn’t like them; he just needed to push a little bit harder… 

“I’ll get really creative too,” he threatened, “defiling every surface and object in this room so there’s nowhere you can go to get away from—” 

Prowl pounced. Tentacles lashed out faster than Jazz could easily follow and pierced his armor, picking him up like a rag doll. “I’ll break every strut you have and leave you locked in the  _ closet _ if you even think about it,” he hissed, slamming Jazz against the wall behind the berth. “You want me to ‘finish’ you off…”

Jazz braced himself.

One of the tentacles stabbed into his valve, the blades slicing through the lining and piercing the very top, deeper and fuller — and a lot more bleeding! — than Prowl ever could reach with his spike. 

The screech it wrung from his vocalizer was loud enough to rival that of their prey when Prowl had torn its chest open, but beneath the agony there was a note of desperate, depraved desire. “Kyeeeahhh!”

Prowl grinned, showing a vicious grimace. If Jazz’s pleasure had bored him, his pain was much more entertaining. He twisted, savaging Jazz’s valve, and pushed his tentacle deeper into his frame, undulating the flexible, segmented metal against the injured and sensitive valve lining. “Better?”

Not for a mortal, the random thought came again, but for Jazz it sort-of-kind-of-more-than-it-probably-should-be was. He screamed again, his entire undead neural net searing with pain. It wasn’t just the now-severe stab wounds inside his valve; Prowl’s every forceful thrust sent lightning shocks of pain through his cracked struts and the other places Prowl’s blades dug into Jazz’s torso. It was overwhelming. 

Prowl pushed his tentacle deeper in through his valve. Now Jazz could feel it wiggling around, shredding more of his structures, working its way toward his engine. Uh oh… When Prowl had said that about “finishing” him, had he meant it like finishing him off for good? Jazz didn’t want to die! But the knowledge that he might be just about to only heightened things further, leaving him crying out for Prowl to stop/give him more as he tried to press into the same touches he was also trying to evade.

Not that Prowl allowed him much movement at all. Jazz pushed at Prowl’s frame with his foot, an instinctive movement to try and get the thing that was hurting him away, and the sparkeater grabbed and twisted it in its socket until something broke. 

“Owwwww_wwww,"_ Jazz sob/moaned. The hot flare of the break quickly turned to persistent throbbing as his foot dangled loosely at the end of his leg. It probably wasn’t going to fall off (this time), but the damage was bad enough that even if he survived this, he wouldn’t be walking away from it afterward.

Jazz’s engine coughed when Prowl stabbed into it, twisting, tearing, rending… but he sobbed in relief when the tentacle started withdrawing just shy of shredding his empty spark chamber. The tentacle flexed and undulated back along his valve, now  _ very _ slick with fluid, before dragging the blades through the damaged lining and out. 

This time when Prowl dropped him and stepped away Jazz moaned and twitched rather than protesting being abandoned. As a final insult and injury, Prowl leaned in and bit off one corner of his audial horn. Jazz hissed in pain and protest to absolutely no effect.

Prowl sat primly down next to Jazz and spread the berth’s blankets over him. “Still unsatisfied?” he asked snidely.

“Nnnnhhnn…” There hadn’t been one true peak of sensation that Jazz could latch onto as a “climax”, but the sheer amount of sensation had done an excellent job of taking the edge off the clawing emptiness that never completely left him. He would never be sated, but he was, for the moment, satisfied.

He was also a bleeding wreck with bits of his frame dangling from wires and falling on the floor, drenching the blanket Prowl had thrown over him in ichor, but so what? It wasn’t going to kill him.

“You got me all messy,” Prowl remarked, eyeing the purple stains on his plating in distaste. “You had better be prepared to clean me up.”

“Wwiiiilllll,” Jazz promised, his voice grating roughly. It would take time and he would hate being helpless and unable to hunt until his mobility was fully recovered, but he’d just had a fantastic meal. Already his wounds, terrible as they were, were beginning to heal.

“Good.” Prowl smiled cruelly and held out his ichor-covered blades of the tentacle that had been digging around in his engine. “Lick.”

Jazz opened his mouth and tried to reach from where he was, but no such luck. Prowl was close, but not close enough. “Rright nowww?”

In answer, Prowl dug his fingers into Jazz’s neck and dragged him close enough. Jazz let out a hoarse screech. “Now.”

Shivering with pain (which of course only caused him  _ more  _ pain, much to Prowl’s delight), Jazz opened his mouth again and this time was able to taste himself on Prowl’s blades. Eugh. It was awful. It was obvious that Prowl didn’t care; all he cared about was Jazz’s pained whimpers. 

“Good pet,” he praised, stroking his helm gently. Jazz wanted to feel a flush of warmth at the affection, so he let out an unhealthy purr from his engine and leaned into the touch. Disgusting as it was, this wasn’t so bad. Jazz wouldn’t mind licking Prowl clean more often.

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	12. "Get Those Things Away From Me!"

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What a night! Jazz laughed under the strobe lights. The whole room was one hot, blinding, throbbing mass of bodies and he was loving every second of it. Finding the rave had been a happy accident; Jazz had been scouting the area for ambush spots and blind alleys when the thudding bass resonating beneath his feet caught his attention. It hadn’t taken long to find the unremarkable entrance leading underground after that, and from there…

From there he lost himself in the sound, the movement, the energy of the crowd. The sound of fuel pumps pounding with exertion all around him created a thrilling counterpoint to the music blaring from the speakers and the scent of all that rushing energon was intoxicating. Tempting, too. So very tempting. Already he had his optics on a few choice morsels and was in the process of narrowing down his pick for when the time was right. Until then, he was determined to dance!

As much as he tried, though, the music, the movement, couldn’t touch the gnawing emptiness inside him. It wasn’t fair! They all had so much _ life _ and Jazz only had scraps. He hadn’t managed to dance his way into his choice morsel’s orbit when he’d decided that enough was enough. He needed fuel! _ That _ would help satisfy the craving while he smoothed out the other rough edges with more dancing.

He wasn’t supposed to go hunting on his own. Prowl said he was careless, but it wasn’t like Jazz hadn’t been doing this for a long time before he ever met the sparkeater. Prowl just wanted his “share” of all of Jazz’s rightful kills! 

Most of the time Jazz didn’t mind sharing actually. He had no interest in his prey’s spark. Besides, Prowl made killing a little bit more… more. And it was always nice to be able to hide behind a _ sparkeater _ when something did decide Jazz was dangerous/trespassing/annoying. But if he took his prey back to share with Prowl now, he wouldn’t be allowed to come back to the rave afterwards. Not even if he brought home an orgy and could dance for a week without another kill. He’d be well fed, but unable to dance. Being Prowl’s plaything was okay, but not what Jazz _ wanted _ right now!

It couldn’t hurt to just eat _ one. _ He’d dump the body in the alley, then come back in to dance and start seducing that orgy to bring back for Prowl. It was a perfect plan!

Several hours (and bodies) later it was still a _ good _plan, if no longer quite so perfect. There would be no disguising how long he’d been gone, but he could still bring back several prey to share. A delicious looking trio had been watching him since the last time he’d left the floor with a victim. He was confident he could persuade them they would all have a lot more fun back at his place. 

After more dancing, he settled down on a barstool near them. Giggling, he heard them order a drink to be delivered to him and he smiled. Free highgrade? It wouldn’t really do him any good, but he liked the smell, the taste… it was almost like being able to drink it for real again… He blinked out of his reverie when the bartender delivered it to him. 

“From an admirer,” he told him, staying silent about the trio. 

“An admirer?” He smiled and touched the edge of the glass, then took a sip. Mmm… too bad a second later he had to spit it out back into the glass. But it did taste good. “Tell him he’s got good taste,” he told the bartender, who only nodded and moved on to fill his next order.

Jazz took another sip to savor. _ Very _ good taste, but the inedible energon was making him hungry again… 

Prowl, he reminded himself. He was taking the next three back to Prowl to share. Because Prowl was his hunting partner, and could rip him apart with almost no effort at all, and because he was a pretty great frag even if Jazz was feeling too buzzed from the music to go for being tortured right now. 

When the trio finally approached him, Jazz welcomed and encouraged their advances. One of them was an amazing kisser, to the point that, if he hadn’t been eating all night already, Jazz wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to resist sliding his siphon into his mouth and pulling the life out of him through the kiss. Maybe he’d still do that, but not here. He needed to get this group back to Prowl.

After a few more kisses.

Kisses and touches and more drinks and plenty of dancing and even a quick frag in a dark corner later, and the rave was breaking up and the sun would start coming up soon. There was no more fun to be had here so Jazz finally made his move. 

“Party doesn’t need to end now,” he suggested to Sapphire, who’d been literally hanging off of him and being so _ very _ tempting since he and Snowfang had fragged. He grinded against her, flaring his armor (sans unnatural glow of course) enticingly for her friends. “Buddy of mine and I have a hotel room just a little ways from here.” 

“Oh?”

“Nice!”

“He the kind that doesn’t mind having company?”

“Not at _ all,” _ Jazz purred, wrapping his arms around Sapphire’s slim waist so he could breathe in her aroused, delicious, _ living _ scent. “He’s the kind that loves company. The more the merrier.”

Jazz had learned that while sparkeaters didn’t _ need _ to feed as often as he did, Prowl certainly didn’t object to having the extra food around. 

They giggled, drunk and high and eager and everything Jazz wanted to be and have again. There was almost no discussion before they agreed. They’d psyched themselves up to going home with Jazz before approaching him, and now their decisions were even more compromised.

Normally Jazz couldn’t transform at all, but he’d already fed well tonight and his frame was as lifelike as it ever would be so he folded down into his nearly-forgotten alt form smoothly, even though it was only five blocks to the hotel. Giggling himself, Jazz dashed into the lobby a footstep before the sun. The others clustered around him, bathing him in their scent, their life. He could hear the pulse of energon in their veins as loudly as the bass beat at the rave. It thudded down into his struts, set his tank on fire.

Oh, frag he _ wanted _ them! 

He pressed Snowfang up against the door to his and Prowl’s room, thrusting his tongue into his mouth. Kissing again, and Snowfang was as good at it now as he had been earlier on the dancefloor. He resisted the urge to just thrust his siphon in there again. Soon. Soon. He just needed to get them all to the bed, where they wouldn’t be able to _ run. _ Pouting, Sapphire ground her pelvis against his aft, and Jazz felt her spike starting to extend between them. Jazz felt the blistering heat of her frame, an echo of the muggy heat inside the club. Dizzying and intoxicating. 

The door opened unexpectedly, sending all four of them sprawling to the floor. Jazz grinned up at the dark shape in the shadow. Always as grey as death (unless they’d painted him recently), the sparkeater didn’t risk the light from the hall. It was how Jazz knew he’d be here. “Hi Prowl! I brought some guests.”

“So I see.”

“Hope that’s alright?” Sapphire was the first to get back on her feet, brushing off her plating before sashaying fearlessly, foolishly up to Prowl. “He said you’d enjoy the company.”

Jazz saw Prowl’s gaze sweep over them, caught the greedy, hungry look in his optics. “I will,” he promised her, offering his hand to her companion. 

“Mine first,” Jazz sing-songed as he pushed himself to his feet and pulled Snowfang up next to him. He nibbled his armor. “You can play when I’m done.”

“I wouldn’t dream of interrupting,” Prowl said dryly, which Jazz knew was a filthy, dirty lie. “I’ll let you have your fun before punishing you for being late,” he promised, mayhem lurking behind a tone as soft and smooth as silk. 

“Oooh… Punishment,” the third mech, Comet, purred from Prowl’s side. “Maybe I’d like to skip directly to that.”

“Yeeeeah, no, I’d really rather not,” Jazz said with a nervous laugh. So much for placating Prowl with extra food. He probably should have known better, but the knowledge that he would indeed be paying for his distraction soon wasn’t enough to make him regret it. “Play first, punishment later?”

“You go right ahead,” Prowl said sweetly, shooing Jazz and Snowfang and Sapphire towards the unmade bed. Jazz heard the hotel room door lock as Prowl pulled it closed. Then he reached out and took Comet’s hand again, gaze smouldering. “I’ll just get this one… secured for later. He can watch. Ropes alright for you?” he asked his victim.

“More than alright.”

Jazz snickered. It wouldn’t be alright for long. For them.

“Come ooon, he said you could play with us.” Sapphire tugged on Jazz’s arm, but he ignored her in favor of Snowfang for the moment. They had kissing to continue…

They wound up fragging first. Jazz forced himself to start off slow to avoid damaging his prey prematurely. They never lasted once he really got going, and he wanted this to last! The charge rising in Snowfang’s frame tickled Jazz’s claws as his control frayed and they began to extend, and Sapphire settled behind him, no longer just grinding but actually thrusting into his exposed valve… It all felt so good!

“Primus, that’s hot,” Comet moaned from the other bed. Jazz couldn’t see, couldn’t look, but he could hear the bed creaking as he strained to take in the view.

Prowl was silent.

Soon, too soon, but also not because he’d been waiting _ all night, _ Jazz could not resist. He kissed Snowfang hard, licking his lips and opening their mouths to taste each other. Snowfang moaned, very close to his own overload as he let Jazz have that taste… and Jazz opened his jaw and extended his siphon into that waiting heat. The thickest energon line was a little ways down the throat, the same vulnerable line he went for when biting from the outside. The bladed clamps at the end of his siphon flexed and dug into the soft, moist plating, letting Jazz get a good seal on the energon line before slicing into it to drink. 

Energon, living, breathing, slightly drunk still energon, flowed into his tank. Yesss… He moaned in pleasure, even as Snowfang stiffened in surprise and screeched around the invading siphon.

“Snowfang? Snowfang! Are you— _ oh Primus!” _Sapphire jerked away from him like she was the one he’d bitten. Jazz barely noticed the sound of her panicked scrabbling through the euphoria of feeding. It wasn’t like she’d be able to attack him. Prowl would get her, so he could enjoy the way Snowfang was screaming into their kiss and fighting to get free as Jazz started fragging him in earnest.

Somewhere in the room there was a scuffle. There was more screaming. “Get those things away from me!” More voices. It was a delightful blur, almost painful, like staring at a strobe light for too long. 

Jazz wasn’t in any state to notice his prey’s twitching and writhing to escape as anything more than delightful stimulation against his almost-living metal. 

He did notice when that stimulation slowed as his prey weakened. Frustrated, he fragged him _ harder, _ chasing that last, elusive high, then growled. He withdrew his siphon and closed up his jaws; Snowfang choked on the energon trickling from the wounds in this throat into his tank. Jazz looked around for Prowl. He was supposed to _ kill _ their prey, rip his chest open and make the frame jerk and struggle that last, final bit so Jazz could _ climax._

Prowl was watching him impassively, holding a sobbing Sapphire. One of his tentacles was wrapped around her throat and he held her hands securely behind her back. “Finished already?” he mocked. “I should just kill this one and deny you the pleasure. That certainly wasn’t your first kill tonight. We have _ rules _ about that, Jazz.”

Sapphire sobbed a little harder.

But seriously. Now? Did they have to talk about the rules _ now? _Jazz pulled out of the useless, dying frame on the berth with a dissatisfied whine and turned his attention on the prey in Prowl’s hands. Would he really kill her? Or could he still pounce her while Prowl was busy claiming his first spark before it guttered? He just needed a little bit more—!

Only one way to find out. Jazz launched himself off the bed at the captive femme, unhinging his jaw as he did so. She screamed, and Prowl didn’t stop him, so he landed against her with a thud. His siphon prodded at Prowl’s tentacle, trying to get at the energon lines under it as he ripped away Sapphire’s valve panel. 

Oh yes! That was _ perfect. _

“You’re disgusting,” Prowl said, letting her go so that Jazz had to wrestle her to the floor once her hands were free. “Don’t drink that one so quickly. If you take the one tied to the berth without permission I will rip you apart.”

Jazz didn’t care.

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	13. In The Kitchen

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Prowl did not generally like eras like this. The world was too interconnected, too  _ small, _ to hide for very long. Even a buried tomb in the middle of a wasteland could not go undisturbed for long. Certainly not long enough for mortals to war themselves back into tiny villages that feared the horizon. And while these eras tended toward a skepticism that allowed both him and Jazz to move around almost unremarked, those who DID believe had access to each other — and their resources and information — at the click of a few keystrokes.

Jazz, naturally, loved eras like this. His hunting style was very well suited to the press of bodies in the cities, the illegal gatherings, the smooshed together apartments. He liked killing, often in sprees when they could, and frequently moving around to avoid being nearby when some hunter came sniffing around a stash of dead bodies in a dumpster. Prowl much prefered the fringes where he could settle in and hold a territory for weeks, months, years, over moving to a new hunting ground every night. 

But it was time to hide. All of Prowl’s experience was screaming at him to do so. Individual hunters gathering in fringe forums and sharing information were starting to gather into organizations. Those few organizations that had existed for centuries were connecting up with each other and to these new pop ups. Their sprees, their  _ pattern, _ was starting to be noticed, to the point they were being hunted as individuals instead of generic members of their kind. Prowl could break the pattern by abandoning Jazz, but Jazz was a good partner, a fun plaything, and there would be no starting again with another.

So while Jazz went out and lured their last victims to their latest bolthole, Prowl finalized his plan for how to hide them until it was safe to emerge and stalk the shadows again.

It was called the  _ Alchemor. _

Mortals finally started to step out into the endless void between stars and what did they do? They built prison ships. Ships that were  _ meant _ to float endlessly through eternity, alone and forgotten. A tomb, but one stocked with enough food to keep two monsters cognizant (if barely) for centuries or more. All they had to do was get to it.

“We don’t have time for your games tonight,” he told Jazz when he returned. “We’re on a schedule.”

“Aww! Since when?” 

_ Since I said so.  _ Prowl glared at Jazz and the two disoriented mechs he had on either arm. Neither prey noticed, too busy squinting stim-bright optics in an attempt to see in the dark room, but Jazz did. He stared back for a couple of seconds, then gave in without a fight.  _ Smart pet. _

“Alright, you heard the mech,” he said to his dazed hangers-on. “No time to waste. Come with me.”

One of them had the sense to hesitate. “What’s going on?”

“Dunno, pretty,” Jazz cooed, stroking him gently on the cheek. “He’s probably just in a Mood. We’ll go over here and try to be quiet.” 

They both giggled. What  _ they _ had in mind was not quiet. To be fair, what Prowl and Jazz had planned wasn’t either. 

“Bleh,” Jazz said a few minutes later, closing up his jaw over his siphon. “Almost not worth killing them at all if we’re going to be that efficient about it.” 

Prowl dropped the second corpse next to the other on the berth. Spark energy buzzed nicely in his tank. “If starving is better, I’m sure I can arrange that,” he threatened. Building an oubliette would be less effort than breaking into a prison ship, and Prowl could hold a territory for a while if Jazz was contained.

“I don’t doubt it,” Jazz grumbled, “seeing as you’ve done it before.”

“Then stop complaining. We’re leaving.” 

“Leaving? But we just got here tonight! I haven’t even killed more than, uh, three people yet!” Jazz trotted after Prowl as the sparkeater swept out of the room. He checked that the Do Not Disturb sign was in place, leaving the frames to be found by housekeeping once their paid time here had run out. “You can’t blame me for it this time! I haven’t even done anything!”

“Be quiet,” Prowl scolded. He didn’t bother asking if Jazz was well fed enough to transform. If so, he was the only one and they’d still need to walk. “We’re headed there,” he pointed to where the  _ Alchemor _ hunched over the landscape, being loaded up before launch. “We need to get into it. Without killing anyone on our way in.”

Some of Jazz’s sourness disappeared at that. “Stealth mission?”

“Very much so. We’re going to be on it when it leaves, but if they know anyone has broken in, they’ll delay the launch.”

“And sweep the ship looking for us, for all the good their instruments will do.” Jazz snickered. “Okay then: we sneak onboard and find a place to hide until… where’s it headed?”

“Once we figure out how it works,” Prowl said truthfully, “wherever we want.” He could have lied and said it was going to one of the colonies, and maybe they would head that direction eventually, after they had hidden for long enough. “It’s a prison ship. No destination. A pantry to sustain us until we get wherever we want to go.” No need to tell Jazz just yet that it was going to be a… while… until they did anything but drift. He always hated, and resisted, being sealed away, despite the fact that Prowl’s contingencies had made him the oldest of his kind to ever exist.

“Oooooh, it comes with a buffet? I thought it was just a cargo ship!” The bounce was back in Jazz’s step as he slunk silently through the shadows with Prowl. “I guess it still is, in a way. Just with edible cargo. What about the crew? It’ll be kind of hard to make friends with them to get information as stowaways. Do we need them to figure out how it works?”

“It’s an automated ship,” Prowl informed him, sticking to the shadows himself. Not that two mechs enjoying the evening together was suspicious in any way. “There’ll be a single caretaker. We’ll observe him and the operation of the ship for a bit sticking him in one of the stasis pods in case we need him later. Or decide to eat him.”

“I vote we eat him.” Surprise, surprise, though it wasn’t like Prowl didn’t agree. He was just capable of not  _ rushing  _ that decision. “You think this’ll be enough to lose the hunters?”

“It had better be.” Even if those blasted mechs tracked them here, to Altihex, and even guessed that they’d stowed away on the  _ Alchemor, _ there would be no finding where they had gone in the vastness of space. As soon as they took control of the ship, got rid of the caretaker, and changed its route, they would be well and truly  _ off the radar. _

The docks were relatively busy when they reached them. There weren’t any passenger transports in right now, but some mechs had come early for the next one, and of course there were all the workers. 

“Cameras,” Jazz whispered, pointing to something on the ceiling. “Can’t let them see us either if we don’t want anyone knowing we’re on board.”

Curse this advanced technology.

Prowl nodded. “Lead,” he commanded. Jazz was better at dealing with passive observers than he was. “Get us in safely.” 

“You got it, boss.” 

When he was focused on the task at hand, Jazz was perfectly capable of being, well,  _ capable.  _ Alert and cautious in that strangely relaxed way of his that deflected suspicion, he navigated them smoothly all the way out to the supplies waiting beside the  _ Alchemor.  _

“Stay on this side and don’t peek over the top,” he warned, testing several crates with his claws. “We might be able to get inside this one…” 

With Prowl’s strength, they did succeed in opening it. It was immediately apparent that there was no room for them, however. “Undetected” meant not leaving displaced supplies lying around, so they reprogrammed the lock to reseal it and moved on. It took several more tries to find one they could actually get inside. Jazz reprogrammed it to open again in several days. Hunger would have set in by then, but neither of them would be insensate. 

Prowl crawled inside and pulled Jazz in on top of him. If anyone disturbed them, they’d shoot the Empty first. They were smooshed very tightly together, rubbing more plating than they usually did during sex. 

Which meant of course, “So, uh, Prowl. How about, um, while we wait…”

“No.”

“But it’s going to be so  _ boring _ in here until it opens!”

“I can smash every strut you have in three places before ripping out your spinal assembly and feeding it to you. Still bored?”

“Yes.” Jazz shifted slightly. “But not  _ that  _ bored. Even if that’s not a very original threat anymore.”

“We have limited space right now,” Prowl informed him dryly. It was an understatement. “I’ll work on my creativity once we can move again.”

“Fair enough.” Another restless shift. “Hey, Prowl?”

“What?” He was  _ really _ tempted to at least rip out his vocalizer. He didn’t need it for anything useful, and it’d grow back fairly quickly once they’d fed again and in the meantime Jazz would be  _ quiet. _

“This was a good idea.”

Prowl preened. “Yes it was.” Pleased with himself and with Jazz’s cooperation, he went ahead and rewarded him with a gentle  _ scritch _ of claws over the Empty’s audial horns. 

The crate lurched as it was picked up by the forklift alt and loaded into the  _ Alchemor. _

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get it? It's "in the kitchen" because Prowl called it a "pantry". ┬┴┬┴┤(･_├┬┴┬┴


	14. Tentacle Hugs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuation of Ch. 6: Tentacle Sounding.

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Jazz whined piteously. His broken struts ached, and his face throbbed painfully. His tank was empty and he couldn’t mingle with or frag  _ anything _ looking like this! Prowl was unmoved, of course. Even if he hadn’t been the one to inflict the damage, it was unlikely the sparkeater would show any sort of sympathy. He kept Jazz fed though. Maybe less than he’d like, and maybe Jazz had to hurry to lap it up with his split-open, almost nonfunctional siphon before the energon finished dying once Prowl pulled the spark out… but he shuddered to think of what might have happened to him if he hadn’t had Prowl, or if Prowl had cut back significantly on hunting while Jazz recovered.

Because he would recover. Eventually. How long it would take would depend on how much he was fed. Prowl was feeding him only enough to keep Jazz  _ Jazz, _ which meant he’d be better in a few months, maybe a year. Without that help… Centuries while he sipped off the dying and already dead, unable to hunt at all. 

And under Prowl’s care, Jazz  _ was _ Jazz. On his own, he would have descended into being nothing but shambling, desperate hunger.

It wasn’t much, but it was proof he wasn’t  _ just _ a plaything to Prowl. 

Which was another thing Prowl cut back on a bit while Jazz recovered: torturing him.

Jazz’s feelings, when he concentrated on them, on that were mixed. Being Prowl’s plaything wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it always left him genuinely, unambiguously  _ feeling something. _ Pain, fear, pleasure… If Jazz could talk right now, shuffling in Prowl’s wake with his ruined siphon and wide-open jaws, he’d be begging for Prowl to ruin him again, or harassing him until he did it anyway.

Since all he could actually do right now was whine wordlessly in a bid for attention,  _ any  _ attention, he did it again. Prowl hadn’t so much as looked at him since he’d dropped him in his current nest and Jazz was hurting and hungry…  _ Feed me! Insult me! Pet me! _ Prowl did none of those things. He didn’t even kick any of the garbage littering the floor onto him as he prowled around the exterior of the little “house” of flimsy and packing crates and piles of discarded bottles they’d found. Jazz couldn’t imagine what he was looking for. As long as they didn’t go near the Walls that encircled the enclaves of the rich estates, there was nothing here that could harm either of them, just street toughs and “hunters” armed with broken bottles and rocks.

It wasn’t likely he was hunting again so soon. They’d just eaten (nowhere near enough!) a few hours ago and besides, the sun was coming up. The mechs in the slums were run down, sure, but Prowl’s gray plating looked  _ dead  _ not  _ dirty,  _ and Jazz couldn’t disguise what he was at night right now, let alone stand up to scrutiny under daylight. That wasn’t a problem when his “job” was to basically shuffle around and scare mechs toward Prowl’s ambush (about all he was physically capable of right now), but daylight could make mechs brave. 

Bleh. Jazz whined again, a little louder. 

“Hush!” Prowl snapped, and Jazz could almost feel a bubbly trickle of pleasure at being acknowledged. He rustled the rubbish he was laying in a little, his next whine coming out more pained thanks to the movement.

“If you aren’t  _ quiet, _ I will find another place to rest,” Prowl threatened with an irritated flick of his doors. He was still looking for, or at, whatever outside and didn’t look into the crate where the miserable Empty was curled up.

Jazz stilled, whine trailing off into a whimper. Prowl would do it if he pushed too hard. Not a risk he was willing to take this time. Pushing Prowl could be a fun game, but it wasn’t one he could afford to lose when he already felt so helpless and horrible (and hungry, had he thought about that recently?) and what he thought was probably lonely. 

Seconds ticked by slowly. Jazz waited, trying not to shuffle or whine or make any noise at all. Sunlight slowly crawled across the floor as the sun rose. He didn’t understand why Prowl stayed out there… Especially not when he could be in here,  _ with Jazz. _

Three of his fingers were broken, and he couldn’t retract his claws very well, but he ignored the cold aching and tried to entertain himself by tearing a piece of flimsy into tinier and tinier pieces until he had a tiny pile of confetti that he couldn't get a good enough grip on to tear up further. Then he drew random squiggles and other designs in the pile of fragments. 

Prowl’s shadow blocked the weak sunlight as he crawled into their shelter. Huffing, he stole all of the bits of trash that Jazz had pulled around himself to form a nest to make his own nest and settled down in it just far enough away to be not-touching Jazz. 

Jazz went to whine, remembered he wasn’t supposed to be whining, and succeeded in choking himself as he tried to swallow the sound.  _ Frag,  _ coughing hurt!

A smile curled at the corners of Prowl’s mouth. Amused and entertained by Jazz’s pain. 

The problem with entertaining Prowl that way was that it really did hurt. When the coughing fit finally subsided, Jazz couldn’t work up the energy or the will to do it again on purpose. Pain that didn’t even get Prowl’s hands on him was pointless. He tried to resign himself to spending the day huddled up in his not-a-nest alone.

Jazz didn’t sleep, but he managed to settle into a sort of physical equilibrium where he only ached a little bit and his desire for  _ fuel/fun/frag/Prowl _ was a dull roar that only took up most of his thoughts.

Then Prowl moved. Jazz snapped out of his resting trance, blinking sleepily. He watched the sparkeater’s bladed tentacles unfurl from his frame beneath his doorwings and several reached out to wrap around Jazz. Perfunctorily he was dragged that last, minute distance, into plating contact. 

“Good pet,” Prowl praised in a sibilant whisper. Bladed tentacles threatened to rip and tear and sharp claws  _ screeee _ ’d gently across Jazz’s corroded chest armor. “I knew you could be quiet if you wanted to be. I’ll have you trained properly yet.”

Whatever. Jazz was too happy that Prowl was touching him to take offense at anything he said.

“Don’t move,” Prowl commanded. Not that Jazz really could, wrapped up in tentacles strong enough to lift a truckformer off his feet. “Rest.”

No arguments there. Jazz dimmed his visor and focused on Prowl’s solid presence. There was no warmth in his frame, or even really in the gesture (though the sunlight was a little warm), but that was alright. Prowl took care of him. A few mental gymnastics and suspension of disbelief was all he needed to believe that meant he cared for him.

And tonight they’d be hunting again. If they were lucky, and Prowl let him lap up his scraps quickly enough, he’d be something approaching less hungry by tomorrow.

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	15. Oviposition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: Um... dark magic and baby eldritch horrors here. Gotta go add that oviposition tag...

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“…soldiers of dead gods! How dare they! I’ll show  _ them. _ I am the true master of life and death!” 

Prowl woke slowly to the sound of someone ranting nearby. He blinked, trying to clear his head. What was he doing? Where was his sword? There was a hole in his memory and an ache in his helm, which the ranting was doing nothing for. Something about that phrasing was familiar though, as was the voice. He knew that voice. 

“Megatronus,” he growled softly, pushing himself to his feet. His vision was still blurry, but he could make out the Betrayer pacing around a black marble edifice. Frag, the mech was just plain massive. Even receiving the spells of protection from Prima and Solus Prime had not prepared him for the sheer size of the Betrayer. Now he  _ really _ wanted his sword, but the blessed glassteel blade was nowhere to be seen. 

“Ah, you wake at last.” Megatronus stopped and turned toward him. His burning gaze was heavy enough that it felt like an actual weight on his shoulders. “What fool’s errand did your masters send you on?”

Fear gripped his struts. Megatronus might not have been a god in truth but, like his siblings, he was only a small step from it. The living gods. Demigods. Prowl had been raised in the temple, and they may not have been visited by any of the sacred ones until Prima and the others had assigned him this errand, but he had been conditioned to always speak truth should he find himself in their presence. It was a very hard habit to break, and Prowl opened his mouth to tell him about the army gathering across the river. Then he clamped it shut, saying nothing. 

He might not be able to lie to the Betrayer, but he could still choose not to speak.

Megatronus took it in stride. “You think to protect your brethren with your silence, but your devotion does you no credit. Neither it nor they can save you now.”

No. Prowl had no illusions of that. Mad as he was, Megatronus was one of the First, the Original Thirteen. Prowl was just… Prowl. His paltry blessings were like a candle flame in one of the Rust Sea’s infamous gale storms. And his companions would not risk the attack to come for him. Prowl was at peace with that; he’d accepted the possibility of death when he set out from the Temple. 

The problem he had now was that, as long as he lived, he could be bent to the Betrayer’s will. Not with torture, but with dark magic. Even his unliving frame could be used as a weapon by the Dark One. However, an empty frame would not retain the so-critical information that would endanger the mission. Softly, he recited the prayer for deliverance, asking for Primus and the Guiding Hand to keep evil at bay, for Mortilus to take his spark and guide it to the Allspark. 

“Prayers cannot stop me,” Megatronus laughed. “You waste your breath on empty words.”

Prowl coiled himself and flared his doorwings for balance, then launched himself right at the godlike tyrant. He had no weapon, just his fingers curled like claws and teeth unsuited to gripping, ripping, or tearing. He had no chance of victory; only the hope that the Betrayer would strike him down without thought, like the glitchmouse he was before such power.

“Foolish mortal!” Hands larger than his head intercepted his hopeless attack, crushing his arms to his sides and lifting him off the ground in a grip Prowl had no hope of escaping. “You have lost! Accept your defeat.”

Prowl bit him.

Of course it did no damage. It didn’t even scratch the Betrayer’s paint.  _ Kill me! _

Again the monstrous mech laughed. “So determined. But is it determination to live? Or to die?” Prowl didn’t answer. He tried to kick the demigod and managed to flail with only a little bit more vigor in his grip. “No matter,” Megatronus said after a minute. “Hold him.”

Flesheaters and Empties shuffled out of the shadows to obey. Prowl flinched at the touch of their unholy, dead metal. No warmth, no spark… Just the pulse of unnatural life. His fate. 

These he managed to fight a little more successfully than he had the Dark One himself. They drew back from his prayers, their flesh smoked if they touched one of the blessings Prima had etched into Prowl’s metal, and their strength was not so far beyond his own, but still they obeyed. None of the minions holding him had weapons either, or else Prowl would have made a very serious attempt at grabbing one. He did try to impale himself on a set of claws or three, but Megatronus’ control over them held them back from any sort of damaging blow. Prowl found himself held, no matter how much he fought. 

“Prayers cannot help you now,” Megatronus repeated. He held a short, black knife up and began drawing sigils into the air. They did not linger as flame, but Prowl could feel his struts, his spark, shuddering away from the energies gathered by the spell. It wasn’t a ritual he knew, wasn’t a ritual he  _ wanted  _ to know. He felt sick.

The athame slashed down through the invisible glyphs and a… a  _ hole _ opened up to  _ somewhere else. _ Darkness rushed outward like a wind, staining and corrupting everything it touched. Unseen, unknowable shapes twisted on the other side of the rift. They looked at them with incomprehensible intelligence. They  _ reached _ for the portal Megatronus had made, trying to escape into the world. Prowl screamed. 

Unconcerned with the things his actions had attracted, the Betrayer reached into the tear and plucked something from the darkness. He cradled it to his chest and cooed spells to it as the portal closed up behind him.

His optics glowed with malignant power when he looked up, smiling triumphantly. The thing in his hand seethed with unnatural energy, disturbing on a level Prowl couldn’t even describe. 

“It took me awhile to perfect this,” the Dark One remarked, coming towards Prowl again. The thing in his hand slowly coalesced, solidified. The wet, glistening tendrils of solid, dark magic were not any easier to look at than the previous pure, otherworldly energy. “You will join the ranks of my most powerful servants. Feel honored!”

Prowl did not feel honored. “No…” he whispered, renewing his attempts to get  _ away. _ “No, no, no,” he was not ashamed to admit that he begged. He had never seen the, the…  _ larval _ state before, but he knew what Megatronus intended to turn him into. “Please, my lord, my god, don’t do this.”

There was a mockery of kindness in the Betrayer’s smile. “You fear the darkness now, but the gift I am giving you will take that fear away. Strength and power will be the reward for your service — and I won’t even ask that much of you in return.”

Just his information. Just utter subjugation to the Betrayer’s will. 

Megatronus was  _ more _ than capable of controlling sparkeaters. As spells went, that one wasn’t uncommon. Necromancers of any power bargained with their demons to be granted it as soon as they could. Of course, one of the living gods wouldn’t need to bargain with demons for his power. Even so, no one knew he was capable of  _ creating _ a sparkeater from nothing but spellwork and will!

“Please, no.” Prowl kicked out again, one last ditch struggle. Useless. 

With one hand, Megatronus dug his sharpened fingertips into the seam where Prowl’s chesplates would open. The soldier clamped them closed, but he was no match for the demigod’s strength, and he only needed a sliver of access. 

The bundle of wet tentacles slithered from its summoner’s hand and onto Prowl. He screamed; it was the only defiance left to him.

Slowly, inexorably, the entity of dark magic forced its way inside him. Every inch of plating it touched as it flattened and twisted burned both hot and cold before going unsettlingly numb. 

Megatronus released him and allowed his chest to snap closed once the disgusting thing had wriggled its way under the plating. He could still feel it, inside him, squirming through his internals as it dug its way deeper. It clogged his engine, flowed through his musculature, pricked along his fuel and nervewires. Prowl would have clawed open his own chest to  _ get it out, _ but the controlled minions held him fast. 

His screams turned to sobs when it reached his spark chamber.

He could feel it prying at the seams, digging at minute weaknesses until it found a place where it could slither inside.

Alien hunger invaded him as it touched his spark. It had a consciousness of sorts. A will of its own. Prowl had not expected that, but he would have preferred to exist for eternity in the Well without knowing this thing’s desire to feed, defile and propagate. 

“It is done.” Megatronus’ voice was pleased. “Your life ebbs, fueling what you will become. Death approaches, but do not be afraid. When it arrives, simply take its hand — and rise!”

Prowl wasn’t rising though. The minions released him and all he could do was stagger a couple of steps and then collapse to the floor. He curled around himself, trying in vain to protect his spark from the horror nibbling on it. His vision swam and he swore he could hear a sort of uncanny, eldritch chittering, whispering to him about the  _ other place _ from which Megatronus had pulled the larva. 

It spoke of its greatest kin, the things that had looked through the portal but couldn’t fit through. Prowl whimpered, trying not to hear. 

_ … you and I are one… _

Prowl’s vision whited, then went black, as his spark was consumed utterly. 

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The supplicant who’d sought him out finally finished his ridiculous and overprepared speech. Prowl considered him as he prostrated himself before him, awaiting his “blessing”. He wasn’t sure when it had become the custom for would-be necromancers to seek out a sparkeater and offer their services in exchange for immortality, but this wasn’t the first time Prowl had been approached.

Jazz paced restlessly behind him, bored by the mech’s ramblings. “Wanna tell me again why we haven’t already eaten him?”

It was a good question. They’d eaten previous supplicants, usually before the speechifying had even ended. This was the furthest any of these mechs had gotten with Prowl.

He  _ wanted _ to just eat this one too. This was an annoying ritual, and Prowl had no need for a minion or whatever he was offering in exchange for being made into a sparkeater. An annoyance as a living minion and competition as an undead one. Prowl did not want to grant this mech’s wish. He  _ wanted _ to eat him… 

He unfurled his tentacles to look down at them. Right where they connected to the rest of his frame, he could see the shadow of dark magic, tiny ethereal tentacles reaching out to search for its own victim-host. It already had its most basic, otherworldly will. Soon — in days or weeks, Prowl wasn’t sure — it would become solid, slithering and wet even if he did not offer it a victim-host, and at that point the need to  _ propagate _ would overwhelm his other wants. 

Prowl had no reason to choose this mech. He definitely didn’t need anything he was offering. But he had no reason  _ not _ to choose this mech either.

And choosing him now would make it  _ his  _ choice. He wouldn’t have to worry about losing control in a situation where he could ill afford to.

“I’m gonna eat it,” Jazz declared, apparently taking Prowl’s silence as permission.

_ Wrong answer, pet. _

One of Prowl’s tentacles lashed out and wrapped around Jazz’s throat to yank him away. Normally he’d have no compunction against stabbing through Jazz’s plating and shredding him, but he did not want the Empty’s curse interfering with his own. He tossed his pet aside, where he crashed against the nearest wall and landed in a heap (and even stayed there, sulking).

He turned his attention back to the supplicant, who was watching with wide, frightened optics that he very quickly averted, looking down to the floor. 

“I have no need for another servant,” Prowl answered him through his sharpened teeth, starting to bargain. Maybe he had to do this, bend to his own curse’s need to propagate, but it was still his choice, and he was determined to get  _ something _ out of it before he agreed. “So tell me: what else could you possibly offer me in exchange?”

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	16. Tentacles in Peril

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“You really are piling on the crazy,” Ironhide drawled, pausing to take in Ratchet’s bedroom, the only room in his little clinic that patients and his very infrequent interns didn’t have access to. “Talking about ghoulies and monsters is one thing, but this…”

“‘This’,” Ratchet waved vaguely at the complex web of string and sticky notes sprawled across two of the walls (and beginning to spill onto a third), “helps me make sense of the crazy. It’s messy but it works.”

“Uh-huh…” Ironhide closed the door behind him, probably in some misguided attempt to protect Ratchet’s reputation. Pfft. Whatever. Like the slum dwellers  _ cared _ if the mech patching up their cuts and replacing their rusted parts had a conspiracy-theory wall. Some of them would even try to bond over it!  _ Not _ that Ratchet wanted to talk to them about Cybertron’s leaders being replaced by organic lizard-alien invaders.  _ Talk _ about crazy! “You gotta know how this looks though.” 

“I’m crazy, remember? Not stupid.” And he didn’t mind people thinking he was crazy — for the most part. There were certain circles it wasn’t a good idea to bring the subject up around, but he’d long since gotten over his initial hangups about how his activities looked. “Anyway, if it’s crazy and it works, it’s not really crazy.”

“I think you got ‘crazy’ and ‘stupid’ mixed up there.” Ironhide peered at one cluster of notes and strings. “Empty sightings? How’s that help anything?”

“On a straightforward level it tells me which places to check for contamination to prevent outbreaks.” It wasn’t foolproof; not all of the Empty sightings he got word of were real and sometimes the places they’d been “seen” weren’t places he had access to, but it did make a difference. Not to mention, if there really was one and he got there fast enough, he could kill the Empty and check to see if  _ it _ had originally died from a sparkeater attack.  _ Those _ got cross referenced as both sparkeater victims and with known victims of the “mother” of Empties that Ratchet was really tracking. Cleansing spots where random Empties were wandering around bleeding ichor didn’t exactly get rid of the root of the problem! “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and you can’t tell me I’ve mixed  _ that  _ one up.”

“No. Except the part where you’re treating the fictional undead like a real disease.” Ironhide looked at Ratchet appraisingly. “You realize that’s a movie trope, not a real thing, right?”

Ratchet sighed. “I realize talking to you is like banging my head against a wall sometimes. Look, if you don’t want to help me, just say so.”

Ironhide sighed too. “I’ll help, if only to keep you from getting mugged while you’re chasing after spooks. So what are we supposed to be doing?”

“Raiding a nest — I hope.” Ratchet plucked at one of the strings, trailing his fingers from the edge of the web to a point where a bunch of things had finally come together. “That’s the other thing I’ve been using this for: to track down the monster, or monsters, creating these things. You see these?” He tapped another group of strings. “The number of Empties cropping up around here increased noticeably a few months ago. They appear in clusters, concentrated in one area before moving on to another following the same pattern of those grisly murders.”

The “clusters” were difficult to see, since it wasn’t strictly speaking  _ clusters of Empties. _ It was a specific pattern of kills: sparkeater kills,  _ some of which _ became Empties, followed by more Empties spawned from the contaminated ground the original monster left behind — and continued to do so until Ratchet found the spot and doused it with Alpha Trion’s holy oil. That’s why Ratchet had needed the wall full of sticky notes! But he thought he’d finally caught up with it — them — whatever — and he was going to get rid of it! 

Ironhide squinted at the intersection of kills, undeath, and contamination. Ratchet saw another protest lurking in his optics, then he sighed dramatically. “If I don’t come with you, you’re just going to steal my blaster again and go alone, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Ratchet said bluntly. He couldn’t let the opportunity go without at least  _ trying.  _ “But I’d rather not have to. I don’t know exactly what I’m going up against. Having some backup would really be appreciated.” Legends said  _ a _ sparkeater, or sometimes two, but Ratchet didn’t really put his faith in myths unless he’d verified them personally. It was just as likely he was about to bust in on a nest of dozens of Empties, or… or something else entirely! Dark sorcerers were supposed to be able to make Empties and control sparkeaters and maybe Ratchet didn’t really believe in  _ magic _ but a few months ago he hadn’t believed in the undead either! 

Even then, while Ratchet kind of felt disturbingly comfortable dealing with Empties — with the mindless shuffling and the rawr, groan, feeeeeed — by now, he had no idea what to expect from a sparkeater except, you know, that they apparently ate sparks. From the bodies this one (or ones) had left behind, he surmised they were physically strong enough to rip off chest plating, but other than that… 

“Alright.” Ironhide drew a small blaster from his subspace, checked the safety was on, and handed it to Ratchet. “Since you apparently didn’t damage yourself when you borrowed it last time, I’m going to assume you know how to use that.” 

“Well enough to be getting on with,” Ratchet said, handling it competently. “Thank you, Ironhide. Even if you are only doing this to humor me.” 

“Sure.” He shrugged. “Just keeping you from getting mugged, like I said.” He pulled his own, much larger weapon from his subspace and checked it over. 

While he did that, Ratchet gathered his own supplies. He had a subspace just  _ full _ of holy oil, but nothing to ignite it if he needed to burn a bunch of stuff too, so he packed lighter fluid and matches. And gloves; he did  _ not _ want to touch anything contaminated! Ironhide huffed when he saw what Ratchet was doing, but didn’t say anything. 

Just as Ratchet had planned (hoped), they set out from the clinic in the middle of the day. It wasn’t a verified fact, but some legends said sparkeaters didn’t really do out during the day. Some cited that they were damaged by the sun, or just generally feared the light. Whatever the truth, Ratchet only cared that if they were going to bust into an abandoned shipyard, search through all the crates that may or may not have been turned into home or nest, and confront super strong undead monsters that wanted to eat their sparks, daytime was better than stumbling around in the dark.

Ironhide probably did keep him from getting mugged as they made their way there, not that Ratchet intended to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it. He spotted a couple of gang toughs pacing them part of the way, but they gave them up as a bad job by the time the shipping crate he was looking for came into view. 

Or maybe they were avoiding the shipyard. For an area usually rife with homeless squatters, there was surprisingly little sign of activity in its immediate vicinity.

Ratchet stopped and pulled out two pairs of medical gloves and booties, the sort that slipped over a mech’s feet to curb the spread of disease. “Here. Put these on before we go closer.”

Ironhide rolled his optics. “Ratchet. Movie trope. Not a real thing.”

“Humor me.”

Rolling his optics again, Ironhide obeyed, shuffling his blaster canon from one hand to the other to do so. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” Ratchet wasn’t really, but it was enough that they weren’t going to get contaminated just by walking around.

Together they moved deeper into the shipyard. For thoroughness’ sake, they checked all the crates, though the longer they looked the more obvious it was which crate — if any — was occupied. The rest were either too worn down to be useful at all, or had been abandoned long enough for acid rain to eat through the repairs and patches the occupants had made. 

Circling the single, still-patched shipping crate, Ratchet thought about how strange this was. The nests he’d cleared out previously had all been… junk piles, to put it politely. Cardboard boxes, precariously balanced bits of debris. One taken-over home he’d found a cluster of Empties camping in had been allowed to decay into near uselessness over the course of just a week. 

This crate… the garden its occupant had once tended out front was overgrown and mostly dead, but the structure itself showed signs of being patched within just the past few days. A rusted rent in the metal of the container had been covered with acrylic sheeting, properly fastened down to keep it from sliding off or blowing away and not up long enough to have accumulated pock marks from the rain. The door (and the fact that there was still a door at all was unlike the other nests he’d encountered) had a likewise undamaged handle. 

Creepy.

Ironhide gestured Ratchet away from the door before easing it open gun first. It wasn’t locked, but that was normal here in the Dead End. No one could afford locks.

Nothing jumped out to attack him, and after a minute Ironhide finished opening the door and gestured with his head that Ratchet could go inside. “No one’s home.” 

_ Damn.  _ “Let’s take a look inside then.” If he couldn’t take out the monster(s), maybe he could still learn more about it/them. “Treat it like a crime scene — don’t touch anything.”

Ratchet didn’t see Ironhide roll his optics (again), but he  _ knew _ that he totally did.

It was dark inside, and Ratchet had to fumble for a chemlight, washing the whole place in eerie green light except where the spotlight on Ironhide’s rifle fell. Ratchet could have used a lamp too, but he’d learned that the chemlights didn’t drown out an Empty’s fresh ichor.  _ Unfortunately, _ the ichor didn’t need to be fresh to be contagious, but it was better than nothing.

And there had definitely been an Empty or Empties bleeding in here. Ratchet curled his lip in disgust. The nest of scraps that had been built on the bed of cardboard showed traces of the dim, purple glow in the creases, and there were drips on one of the walls.

_ Burn it all and purify the ashes, _ he thought. But first, to learn more about his quarry.

This had been someone’s home at some point. The cardboard mattress wasn’t something he’d seen other Empties bother with, and there were other belongings — cubes and bottles and cans of now-spoiled fuel — that had been swept aside, out of the way, and left to rot. 

No slum dweller would leave fuel to rot.

“Whoever lives here likes music,” Ironhide commented. Ratchet turned his head and saw the rifle’s light shining on a small handflute made of scrap piping. It was laying on a flyer advertising a concert inside the Walls. A current flyer.

Repairs to the dwelling, a musical instrument, a flyer, and… now that Ratchet was looking around for them, news flimsies that hadn’t been just crumpled into bedding but looked like they were in various stages of being read… This, whatever it was, was no mindless Empty. Great. Just… great.

Ratchet shone his chemlight on the detritus, looking with new purpose. Most slum dwellers couldn’t read, but if this/these monsters could… He saw a few scattered sheets of what looked like handwritten sheet music. There was something odd about it though. The characters didn’t look like modern Cybertronian Standard, and was the scale off? Ratchet wished he dared snag a sheet to bring back to the library for research. Anything to give him some sort of insight into what he was dealing with, but he couldn’t. It needed to be burned with the rest. 

His spark seized, though, when he pushed aside a stack of news flimsies and older adverts for music venues, and saw one of his own flyers, for the clinic, underneath.

“Huh. Will you look at that?” Ironhide peered down at the flyer over his shoulder. “Maybe they’ll come see you about whatever that weird discharge on the bed is.”

“Maybe,” Ratchet answered automatically as dread replaced shock. He’d spent all these months hunting monsters. He hadn’t ever considered that they might be watching him back.

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	17. Tentacle Gags

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Jazz thrashed, wiggling, trying to get free. He even unhinged his jaw to try and get some leverage, but Prowl just forced the loop of tentacle deeper into Jazz’s mouth, muffling him. “Mmnnnu!”

“Be quiet,” Prowl admonished with an accompanying squeeze of the tentacles twined around Jazz’s arms and torso. “You already had your turn. Now you wait.”

Prowl was _ so mean. _ The femme was cowering in the corner while the sparkeater turned his attention to her, licked his lips. Jazz hadn’t even gotten a chance to frag her!

Jazz squirmed. He was so _ hungry. _

So maybe he’d eaten the other one, and _ accidentally _ killed her before Prowl could have his share, but that was no reason to be so cruelly denied his chance at this one. He was the one who’d seduced them both up here! He whined, biting Prowl’s tentacle to try and get it to loosen its grip.

The result was a different tentacle tightening and the blade on the end digging into his plating. “Bite me again,” Prowl said dangerously, “and see what happens.”

That sounded like an invitation… Jazz bit again, sawing his jaw segments like he was trying to chew through a mech’s armor.

_ Ow! _The blade at his side punched through his armor, biting into his internals in a mimicry of his treatment of Prowl’s tentacle. 

The femme in the corner whimpered.

One little tentacle-poke wasn’t enough to deter Jazz. He bit again. Prowl growled. With a sudden burst of violence, he ripped open the femme and ate her spark, then pushed Jazz down face first into the gaping wound where her chest had been.

Hungry and ecstatic and _ swimming _ in the scent of freshly spilled fuel — fuel that would quickly die now that there was no spark in the frame. Jazz tried to extend his siphon to drink. 

“Mmmmnfff!” 

“You had,” Prowl repeated brutally, “your turn!” The tentacles holding him shifted, repositioning to pin him in place but _ not unblocking his mouth! _

“Mmuurff! Nnnggth!” Jazz protested. He wiggled more desperately. But all that fuel was just _ going to waste! _

“Actions have consequences. I begin to despair of you ever learning that, but in the increasingly vain hope that it’s still possible,” a second loop coiled around Jazz’s head, further blocking his mouth and impeding his ability to bite back, “I’m going to attempt to teach you a lesson.”

Jazz’s claws ripped into the corpse in frustration. It was hard to concentrate on anything Prowl was saying, much less on anything he _ might _ do to him. She was dead. Gone. Useless. He couldn’t even frag her! The fuel was dying… The thought of it consumed him, made the clawing emptiness inside him open up and swallow him whole. “Mmmff!”

_ Crrrrrnchh! _

Pain flooded in to fill part of the void, searing through him from the holes Prowl had just torn in his shoulders. Jazz let out a muffled scream, but it was a scream of desire as much as pain. Fuel, sex, pain… Prowl… Jazz wanted it all. Anything to fill the void inside him. The bladed tentacles went all the way through him and into the corpse beneath him, trapping him completely as Prowl surged forward to fill the rest of the emptiness with his spike.

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	18. In Space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, hey… added a character death tag. Guess who gets to be the lucky someone…

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“Hey Krok, come here a sex—I mean sec!” Misfire giggled nervously at his mistake, hoping their commander wouldn’t really notice. He didn’t  _ mean _ to! It’s just that this place was making him nervous, what with the broken battleships and the corpses of dead Autobots and Decepticons just hanging in space like they’d been tacked there. “I think I have a signal coming from the moon.”

Which… as far as he knew, there had been nothing  _ on _ the moon to fight for. He couldn’t even find any records of any secret bases or anything!

“One of these wrecks probably just crashed there after everyone was dead,” Krok predicted pessimistically.

“Probably nothing there worth salvaging then,” Crankcase said, equally pessimistic.

Flywheels didn’t share their dour outlook. “Come on, we won’t know that for sure unless we check it out! Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“In a jar I flushed out the waste disposal unit over a decade ago,” Crankcase muttered. 

“None of these ships,” Krok gestured to the floating wreckage around them, “are in any state to salvage.”

“But one that crashed on the moon before they started smashing into each other might still be mostly intact!”

“That’s true…” 

“It’s intact enough to still have a signal. That has to count for something.”

“Be nice if  _ something  _ on this blasted trip counted for something.”

Spinister, who had been staring silently out the viewport while the others argued, tapped a finger thoughtfully against his facemask. “There’s something down there.”

“There’s someth— of course there is! That’s what I said in the first place!” Pfft. Whatever. Misfire ignored Spinister-being-Spinister in favor of asking Krok the all-important question. “Do we check it out?”

Krok sighed, and Misfire’s spark sang. That note of resignation? That right there? That meant they were going to check it out! “What’s our fuel look like? Do we have enough to make it to the planet if we detour?”

“‘Do we have enough to make it to the planet’, he asks.” Crankcase typed a query into the ship’s computer. “We have exactly the same amount of fuel as we did last time you asked, minus what it took to redirect around that— oh. Yeah, technically we have enough to handle a detour. The moon’s gravity is minimal enough we won’t lose that much escaping it.”

“Then we’ll go check out the ‘signal’.” Krok sighed again. “It can’t be any worse a dead end than the rest of these wrecks.”

“Yes!” Misfire pumped a fist in the air. “No more floating bodies!”

“In space,” Spinister added. “No more floating bodies in space. There could be floating bodies on the ship.”

“Not floating. There’s enough gravity down there for that.” 

“How about we focus on the possibility of there  _ not  _ being any bodies? Can we do that?”

“I don’t know. Can we?”

The debate kept them occupied for the duration of the short flight. A few simple maneuvers were all it took to adjust their trajectory and bring them around the moon until they had a visual on their target: an unarmored, un _ damaged  _ mid-size Cybertronian transport. 

“Signal confirmed,” Misfire said, gleefully narrating the updated readout on his monitor. “The ship’s powered down but our sweep activated an onboard beacon. She’s old, Krok.”

“I can  _ see  _ that.”

“Well, yeah, obviously, but I meant, like, reeeeally old. There’s no faction code in the ship’s ID — just a name.”

_ That  _ got everyone’s attention.

_ “Alchemor,” _ Crankcase read off slowly. “Never heard of it.”

“Me neither,” their leader confirmed. 

“Who cares if we’ve  _ heard _ of it.” Flywheels practically vibrated in his place. “I don’t see a single scorchmark on it. It’s pristine. There has to be something still there!”

“Just looks like it set down there to wait for us to find it.” Misfire landed on the moon’s surface with a  _ thump. _ “Sorry.” He giggled. “Let’s go check it out!”

“Okay, but don’t just run out all at… once,” Krok finished lamely as Flywheels shot out the door the second it opened. Misfire only wasn’t right with him because he had to set the parking brake first. There! Set! See, he could remember things.

They kicked up who knows how many millions of years of moon dust rushing over to their find. 

Flywheels found a keypad next to the cargo door… and just stared at it. “I don’t know what to do with this.  _ Have _ we ever dealt with a locked door before? Or anything without giant holes blown in the sides?”

“Um…”

“Did you try putting in the code?” Spinister asked, eyeing the keypad suspiciously. “It is a little odd, isn’t it? The only thing wrong with it is age.”

“Age is enough to make putting in a code we  _ don’t even know  _ not work. See?” Misfire poked several buttons at random. Nothing happened. Not even an angry  _ beep!  _ for getting it wrong.

“Does that mean it’s not powered?” Flywheels asked. 

“It doesn’t appear to be,” Krok confirmed. 

“Lovely. Too bad it couldn’t be the kind of door that opens when it loses power.”

“Pretty stupid to put that kind of door on the outside of a spaceship, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

“What about the code?”

Misfire sighed, throwing his hands up in the thin atmosphere. “There is no code. It’s dead! If you want to try, go ahead.”

Spinster just blinked placidly at him and reached for the keypad. His attempt looked a little less random than Misfire’s had been, but yielded the same results. “It needs power. I’ll just…”

“Whoa!”

“Hey!”

“Watch what you’re—!”

_ Tssszewwwwoooop! _

Spinister re-holstered his blaster as the door shuddered on its track. “It’s open.”

That wasn’t exactly true, but the brief surge of power had been enough to get it open just a crack; Misfire didn’t feel a wind or breeze from escaping atmosphere, which indicated there was a hole in it somewhere that they could have looked for after all. Krok, horrible taskmaster that he was, made them all line up and push until the door finished sliding open with a shudder that sent moon dust falling from the roof. Top. What did you call the top of a spaceship anyway?

Inside it was dark. Very dark.

“No atmosphere, no life support, no nothing,” Crankcase observed, shining a light around the airlock. “We should make our way to the bridge or the engine room first.”

“Won’t help us much if there’s no power there either,” Krok stepped inside, sweeping a second beam of light deeper into the ship, “but wandering around without a plan is a good way to get lost. It would be awfully nice if, for once, we could try to stay together until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“Sure, whatever,” Misfire agreed readily. He trotted inside, turning the nearest corner so he could see what was in here. “Dibs on…  _ Eeeeaaack!” _

“Ack!” Flywheels echoed, bumping into his shoulder when he stopped moving. “Jeez, what was that for? Are you trying to give us a spark attack with tha—  _ aaack!”  _ He and Misfire took turns rushing to hide behind each other until they were back in the airlock. 

“What?! What is it?” Krok demanded.

“B-body. Dead body. Very, very dead body.”

“I told you there’d be bodies,” Spinister said, holding out his hand expectantly. “Pay up.”

“Later,” Krok admonished, creeping forward to take his own look at the “very, very” dead body. “Yeah. I’d say he’s dead. Has been for a while. Rusted through.”

“In this atmosphere?” 

“Maybe it rusted before the ship lost its own.” 

Despite Misfire and Flywheels’ fright, they ended up clustered around the corpse. 

“I wonder what tore him apart,” Spinster mused, looking down the corridor rather than at the body itself.

“Whatever it was didn’t damage the ship in the process.” Crankcase examined the wall and the floor around it. “There aren’t any gouges in the metal deeper than the body itself would have caused, whereas its armor…”

“Not military grade armor, but still some heavy duty stuff,” Misfire agreed, “and it’s been peeled back like tinfoil.”

Krok and Flywheels both flinched. “Lovely image, thanks Mis.”

“I don’t know of a weapon that can do that…” 

“There isn’t one,” Spinster said with certainty. 

“We should keep going,” Krok said, prodding them further down the corridor. “And stick together this time!”

“What are the chances that there’s a— oh hey! A map!” Misfire trotted forward again.

“Who’d put a map on the wall? It’s like an invitation for boarders saying ‘shoot here first!’”

“De-ten-ti…  _ Detention Block!?!” _

“Six of them,” Crankcase confirmed.

“This is a prison ship!”

They all paused to exchange glances. “So… was that mech back there a prisoner, or a guard?” Misfire wasn’t sure which he was hoping for. “Do we know which would be worse?”

Crankcase just shrugged. Krok looked pained. “Let’s just get to the bridge.”

“What I want to know is what happened to the prisoners. If the ship was full there would have been,” Flywheels counted off on his fingers, “a couple thousand prisoners on board. That’s more mechs than some battleships fly with.”

“Maybe they’re still in their cells?”

“A good reason to stay away from the detention block and head to the  _ bridge,” _ Krok said pointedly.

“It’s this way,” Crankcase pointed. “Whenever you boltbrains are ready to get a move on.”

“We’re moving, we’re moving.”

Moving quietly down the empty, echoey halls was creepy though. Misfire kept imagining he was hearing things, from phantom footsteps to a low groaning noise he reeeeeally hoped was the just old metal creaking from their combined weight.

He looked behind them. 

_ “EEEEEEEEKK!” _

Another corpse that looked almost exactly like the first was back there, but  _ this _ one was standing up and shambling after them.

“KILL IT!” Spinister had his blaster back in his hand and two rounds off before he even finished shouting.  _ Tsszew! Tsszew!  _ The blasts hit the thing full in what was left of its chest. It staggered… and kept coming at them.

All of the Scavengers opened fire on it, which did phase it. Especially when Crankcase’s gun managed to blow one of the legs off. It fell to the ground.

Where it continued to squirm in their direction.

“Get to the bridge!” Krok barked, pushing them ahead of himself. “We can seal ourselves in there.”

Misfire and Flywheels momentarily got stuck in the entrance to the bridge. Spinister solved the problem by crashing into them from behind and sending all three of them sprawling into the dark room. There was no power here either, forcing Krok and Crankcase to fumble for a manual way to close the door once they were on the right side of it.

It slammed shut right in front of the rusted  _ thing’s _ face. Misfire could hear it scratching at the metal, trying to claw or dig its way through to get at them.

“What the frag was that?!!?” He could feel himself hyperventilating a little. “Because you all saw that right?  _ Right?!?! _ I wasn’t hallucinating that? Frag, I wish I’d hallucinated that. What the frag was it! It was some sort of—”

“I was just going to ask if I’d hallucinated it,” Spinister said at the same time, “since it’s usually me seeing things you all say isn’t real, but Misfire saw it first so that means it was really there and that shooting at it didn’t—”

“It was like it didn’t even feel it. It didn’t have a spark, it shouldn’t be able to move, but it is  _ clearly  _ still moving.” Crankcase flinched away from the terrible sounds on the other side of the door. “I don’t think it’s going away either.”

“Not while we’re still here. Don’t you see what’s going on here? What that thing is?” Flywheels said in a harsh whisper. “It’s a Terrorcon!”

Everyone looked at Flywheels incredulously. Misfire even saw Crankcase open his mouth to tell Flywheels that was the dumbest thing ever. Then he paused. “I can’t even argue with that,” he said instead.

“Well we’re stuck in here now,” Krok suggested practically. “Let’s figure out how this ship works and if we can get power back. A prison ship should have internal defenses just in case there was a prison break, right?”

“A good prison ship would.” This time Spinister did  _ not  _ holster his blaster. He kept the weapon trained on the door while he poked at the main console with his free hand. 

“I’m telling you, it’s a Terrorcon! A monster that shuns Primus’ light and feeds upon the sparks of the living!”

“Pretty sure they’re supposed to feed on the  _ fuel  _ of the living, actually,” Spinister corrected. He pushed a button curiously. Something flickered, then died. “This is going to take a while.”

“Okay, I don’t care  _ what  _ part of me it wants to eat, I don’t want it to eat me!” Misfire raised his gun at the door, only to have Crankcase bat his arm back down. “What are you doing? If it gets in—”

“It’s not getting in, and they need that console in one piece.”

“I wasn’t aiming at the—”

“Exactly.”

Misfire started to pout, but another screech of metal on metal made him jump and he hid behind Crankcase instead.

More crashes. Then silence.

“…is it a good thing or a bad thing it stopped making noise?!” The question started as a whisper, but turned into a squeak by the end. Misfire tried to make himself as small as possible behind Crankcase. 

“It doesn’t matter if it’s noisy or not as long as it’s out there,” Krok answered in a voice too shaky to be unaffected. “We just need to get the defenses back online and then we can blast our way back to the W.A.P. and get off this cursed rock before it gets in here.”

“There is a functional emergency generator,” Spinister announced. A few lights had come on and stayed on this time in front of him. “The ship’s completely shut down to conserve power though. Cold starts aren’t exactly quick.”

“That’s… well it’s not okay. But as long as we’re in here and  _ it _ stays out there—”

A blade stabbed right through the door.

Misfire and Flywheels both shrieked and the blade withdrew, only for it and two more, arranged in a small triangle, to stab through the door again in nearly the same place. Then several more. They wiggled, digging in firmly, and the door started to peel back a little bit at a time. The metal howled as it was stressed to the point of tearing.

“Like tinfoil,” Misfire whimpered. Flywheels was babbling something about Primus but Misfire could barely hear him over the frantic pounding of his own fuel pump.

_ Tsszew! TSSZEW! Tsszew! _

Spinister, Krok and Crankcase all fired at the widening opening, once again to minimal effect. The blades pulled back momentarily, but then they were back with a vengeance, tearing at the door until they could see the horrible yellow light of a pair of feral optics.

Claws started tearing at the opening, ripping that little bit further open and then the monster pulled itself inside. All the Scavengers fired at it (except Misfire, who was frozen, still hiding behind Crankcase), but all it did was hiss as it launched itself in a flurry of motion at Crankcase. 

Bladed tentacles lashed out, one stabbing at Krok’s hand, impaling it and forcing him to drop his gun. Three more stabbed straight into Crankcase’s torso, ripping it open in a spray of metal and fluids.

It was like some horrible, twisted version of a Cybertronian. Grey like dead plating, it seemed longer and thinner and taller than its frame should be, like there was more inside it than could be contained in its armor. Claws ripped through internals, digging their way into Crankcase’s chest in an instant, bathing the monster in sparklight. It lunged with a mouth full of huge teeth.

Flywheels screamed and tried to go for the hole in the door himself, only to be stabbed by another one of the tentacles straight through his leg, pinning him to the floor. The thing’s face didn’t even turn toward him as he flailed and tried to pull himself free. Its gaze was fixed on Crankcase, gurgling and twitching beneath it.

The jaw leaned in, and Misfire looked away as it engulfed and swallowed his spark.

“Get AWAY from him,” he heard Spinister yell and lunge forward. Metal crashed on metal and the room filled with screams. Somewhere amidst the noise Misfire thought he heard Krok shout at him to “Go! Get out!” The idea of leaving the others behind was awful, but they were already dead or dying and Misfire was already moving, throwing himself at the ragged opening in the door with all the power he could put into his thrusters.

He still got stuck halfway through it.

He squirmed frantically, fighting to get through. He didn’t want to get eaten! He blocked his audios so he wouldn’t hear the screams as he struggled to escape.

A tentacle wrapped around his legs and effortlessly yanked him back into the room. Misfire screeched. The shredded, sparkless bodies of the other Scavengers littered the floor, but Misfire only got a glimpse of them as he was pulled face to upside-down face with the monster.

It looked almost mechlike now, compressed down until its armor fit again, save for the tentacles still unfurled from its back beneath the doorwings. It was covered in energon, and still the same color as a newly greyed corpse, but the optics were cruelly intelligent rather than feral. A smirk hovered on its lips. 

“Tomb robbers really are a universal,” it hissed in accented Cybertronian Standard. 

“This isn’t a tomb,” Misfire’s mouth insisted, somehow separate from the rest of him which was a gibbering, quivering mess.

The smirk transformed into a full-on smile. It was not a nice expression. “It wasn’t intended to be, no, but you’ve disturbed the restless dead just the same.”

“And I’m really,  _ really _ sorry! PleaseletmegoIswearI’llneverdoitagain!”

“I don’t think so. I have a pet to feed,” the dead creature looked out the hole in the door and smiled again, showing its fangs. “And here he comes now. Drawn by the commotion along with the rest of his leftover spawn, no doubt.” Using its two free tentacles and its monstrous claws, it finished ripping the door away. Behind it, the first monster that had chased them lay in pieces, but another rusted corpse shambled toward them, its purple optic band glowing dimly in the emergency lights.

Misfire whimpered.

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	19. Protective Tentacles

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“Geez, this place is a downer.” Jazz finally lowered his stolen flute to look around at the empty square. Despite his efforts, he hadn’t been able to lure anyone away to their inn, or even to the nearest alley where Prowl waited. He’d earned a few coins, but the more nights he went without prey, the less alive he looked and he’d been forced to slowly cut back on playing during the day. Which might have been fine — better for seduction, for ambushes — except there was no traffic at night. At all.

Who would have thought a town built in the shadow of a creepy old castle would be so weird? Just because the thing loomed over the entire landscape like it was watching their every move didn’t mean everyone needed to be so fragging skittish. Honestly, the inhabitants of this place wouldn’t know a good time if it came up and bit them.

“Failed again?” Prowl hissed from somewhere nearby. Jazz looked towards the alley where his companion  _ had _ to be, but didn’t see him.

“I’d say define failed, but even I can’t say ‘fifth time’s the charm’ and believe it,” Jazz muttered softly, knowing Prowl would hear him. “This’s starting to be a problem.” Right now he wasn’t sure if the cranky sparkeater or his own rusting plating was the bigger problem, but both were definitely problems.

“Starting?” Prowl snapped sarcastically back at him, but before he could say anything else Jazz’s attention was captured by someone finally approaching him. 

“Stranger,” the strange mech hailed him. He was tall and lanky and thin, and he wore a torc in the style of the local nobility. An authority of some kind. “I’m going to need to see your busking permit.”

_ Scrap.  _ “I’m terribly sorry, sir,” Jazz answered with his best combination of charm and innocence. “I’ve been saving for it since I got into town, but I haven’t purchased it yet. Am I still in the grace period?”

The mech narrowed his optics at Jazz. “There is no grace period,” he said slowly. “And there’s a curfew, which you are in violation of. I’m going to need you to come with me.”

“No grace period?” Well that was odd, on top of being inconvenient. So was the curfew, although, “I’m sorry I assumed, but I was aware of the curfew. It goes into effect in another hour.”

The officer, noble, whoever he was, puffed up his armor hostilely. “I’m going to need you to come with me,” he repeated. 

_ Scrap and slag.  _ Was he arresting him? Jazz didn’t want to go to jail. Unless there were other prisoners he could eat there… No! Prowl would be mad if he ate prisoners without sharing, especially after the dry spell they’d been having. Plus, he had no idea how dangerous this mech was. His posture was angry, but the rhythm of his fuel pump was slow and steady; slower and steadier than any Jazz had heard in any prey. What was he, really? The whole thing made Jazz suspicious. “Come with you where?”

“To the local guard station,” the mech-thing said evenly. He paused, then added, “We can see about getting you a license after you pay the fine.”

Somehow Jazz doubted he had enough money for both the fine and the permit — assuming this guy actually meant what he said, which he rather doubted. "What if I just head that way," he gestured to the town limits, "and save you the trouble?"

“So help me,  _ locust,” _ a second voice hissed from the shadows. Jazz whirled to face this new obstacle and saw another mech with an older style of frame, wearing an identical torc. “Cooperate or we will kill you where you stand and burn everything you might have touched after.”

Three more appeared around the square as if from the evening’s low hanging smoke as Jazz looked around… 

"That  _ was _ what I was suggesting," Jazz said, deliberately misunderstanding. Should he be edging away from the growing posse? Whatever they were, they all had the same abnormally slow pulse. Exactly the same, in fact; he could hear them all beating in sync. "So where do you get off insulting me like that?" And where was Prowl? Was he leaving Jazz on his own to deal with this?

Instead of answering, the one who’d addressed him first grabbed Jazz by the arm and pulled sharply. Jazz tried to resist, but the mech shaped thing possessed even greater strength. Claws barely long enough to be such pricked against his plating as he was dragged a step forward. “We work hard to manage our herd,” he growled. “We don’t need a plague of your kind in these lands.”

“Hands off my pet,” Prowl hissed, finally deigning to make an appearance.

“Sorcerer,” the mech-thing whispered. One of the others dissolved into the mist and disappeared. “Your kind is not welcome either.”

"His 'kind' doesn't take well to being disobeyed either," Jazz said with a pointed look at the hand still on his arm. "Trust me. I speak from  _ considerable _ experience."

The smoke began to thicken behind Prowl. Tentacles unfurled and shredded the appearing mech-thing as it finished coalescing. Jazz felt the bolt of shock go through the one holding him, the things’ shared pulse skipping a beat.

“And I’m not a sorcerer,” Prowl added. The sparkeater stalked forward and the things not holding Jazz backed up. “A sorcerer would have a reason to leave you alive. A clan of lamiae would make fine minions.”

"Lamiae?!" They were  _ real? _ "No  _ wonder _ there's no eating in this town!"

Prowl ignored him. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

"He's a filthy scavenger. Why would someone like you,” and it was clear in the way they shrank from him that they thought Prowl worth deferring to, if only out of fear, “burden yourself with such an inferior creature?"

Inferior—! "Ex-_cuse_ me," Jazz huffed, twisting his arm in another attempt to get free. Big bad monsters that thought Empties were bottom-tier undead were not healthy for him to be in close proximity to! Unless they were Prowl. Prowl called him worthless all the time, sure, but he kept him around. He took care of him.

“He's  _ my _ filthy scavenger.” In an instant, Prowl shed the last of his mortal form and pounced on the apparent leader.

Ha! Jazz grinned so wide the seams in his face separated. "Hear that? I'm  _ his," _ he crowed triumphantly and, since he couldn't pull himself free without leaving his arm behind (and it wasn't rusted enough to come off easily just now), punched the lamia holding him in the face.

“Ow! Owww!” he howled a minute later when the monster started pulling his arm off anyway.

Jazz didn’t see Prowl dispatch his opponent but he did notice when gray claws appeared to pry the hand dragging him away from his arm and yanked his captor into a whirlwind of violence right in front of him. Jazz had to skitter away from the slashing tentacles and trails of mist in a hurry lest he get hurt!

He hadn’t gotten very far when a different cloud of mist descended on him with a snarl. "You!"

"Ack!" Jazz kicked at the semi-solid hand grabbing at his leg. "Lemme go!"

"How dare you come here and try to take all that we've worked so hard to build," the lamia hissed. "Short-sighted scavenger! Everything around you crumbles with the decay you spread!"

For a moment, the mist surrounded him completely, obscuring everything from sight… 

Then Prowl was  _ there, _ tearing into everything solid enough to connect with. Jazz curled up defensively, making himself as small as possible to avoid both mist-shrouded hands and whirling tentacle blades alike. It was only partially effective; Prowl nicked him several times, splattering glowing purple droplets across the square as he obliterated his assailant.

The frenzy continued until, as suddenly as it began, the fracas was over. Prowl pinned the last lamia down by the throat and tore him apart and that was that.

Jazz kept his head down a moment longer anyway, then peeked out over his arm. "Too bad they weren't edible."

“Indeed.” Prowl shook nonexistent gore off himself and retreated back into his near-mortal seeming form. “Let’s break into one of these houses, then go finish the rest of them off.”

“Cool.” They’d never lived in a castle before.

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	20. Established Tentacle Relationship

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Prowl was… well sleeping wasn’t the right word. He didn’t sleep. Neither of them really did (even if Jazz pretended sometimes). He was resting though. He looked, to Jazz’s experienced optics, relaxed. He’d stretched out into his inhuman form. Not to intimidate or to feed or because he’d lost control due to hunger, but just because they were holed up deep in the empty storm drains, deeper even than the homeless mechs they were currently feeding on, and he had no reason to strain himself with his disguise. 

Jazz inched closer, watching Prowl closely for any sign he was about to lash out. Maybe he wouldn’t this time? Maybe he was relaxed enough to not be looking for reasons to hurt him right now. Not being hurt would be nice. 

Of course Prowl actually did enjoy hurting him, so maybe relaxed and happy wasn’t the best time to try something like this. But when he was upset, it just meant he hurt Jazz to cheer himself up. That was fine. Totally fine. Jazz… well he didn’t  _ like _ pain, really, but it was best when the emptiness was really  _ trying _ to eat him alive. Un-alive? Whatever. Right now, Jazz felt… well he  _ wanted _ to feel relaxed and happy and pleased. Pleasured even. He wasn’t sure he could, but he’d deal with that once he managed to actually  _ get _ Prowl to pleasure him.

“You know I can hear you.”

Jazz froze. “Of course you can.” He wasn’t trying to be  _ sneaky!  _ Just, you know, cautious. “You look comfy.”

Prowl blinked at him, doorwings twitching randomly to account for the lazy loops of his tentacles. “I’m not in the mood for your sass,” he warned, promising dire consequences if Jazz engaged in said sass. Given that hunting homeless mechs through the sewers wasn’t exactly a highly social activity, that threat came with greater than normal implied consequences. If Prowl didn’t need Jazz’s social skills, just an ambush partner, then he’d have no qualms shredding and crippling him until he couldn’t do more than shamble at a slow walk as he herded their prey towards Prowl.

“It’s not sass. I’m not trying to pester, I just…” How could he get Prowl to do what he wanted without pestering? Praise? Petting? “I wanted to be close.”

Prowl was clearly suspicious, but he said nothing as he rolled over and went back to… rest. Permission, of a sorts. Conditional permission, Jazz knew from long experience. Time to make a move without pushing his luck.

Too much.

He crawled the last couple of feet to crouch beside Prowl. His doors were still twitching invitingly, but Jazz wasn’t going to make that mistake again. As much as he wanted Prowl to pleasure him, he wouldn’t do it if Jazz tried to initiate like that. Prowl didn’t have any desire for physical pleasure himself… but he did like to be comfortable. 

One of the looped tentacles had bits of debris clinging to it. Jazz reached out to stroke the dead metal gently, picking away the pieces in the process.

The tentacles all reacted immediately, curling and coiling in threat, poised to strike with their deadly blades. Prowl tensed, but he didn’t move. He didn’t need to. Jazz was absolutely no threat to Prowl at all. “What are you doing?”

“Uhhh… cleaning?” Jazz waggled his fingers innocently. “You have gunk. I thought you might like it gone.”

The blades lowered and Prowl chuckled. It wasn’t precisely a nice sound. It was the sound Prowl made when he was deriving pleasure from someone else’s discomfort. But it wasn’t the worst one, the one he made when he was anticipating a prey’s reaction to the revelation that their spark would not be going to the afterlife and would instead be broken down inside his tank. Which he  _ also _ made when he was gearing up for a good session of “Torture Jazz”. So… generally positive response overall, Jazz judged.

As long as Prowl didn’t say “no”, “stop”, or  _ stab! _

Taking his (admittedly minor) victory while he could, Jazz resumed his cleaning/petting/flimsy-thin excuse to touch Prowl without getting mauled.

Tentacles moved languidly in and out of his reach by some pattern Jazz didn’t understand. He’d seen it before, other times that Prowl was resting in this true form, but the purpose, if any, behind the motions was buried in Prowl’s mind. Or in the will of the tentacles themselves. Something like that. All Jazz knew for sure was that, unless hidden, they were never really still. And it might have been frustrating for Jazz to start petting/cleaning one only for it to move, but he knew better than to try and hold or restrain it in any way, because stabby.

It was almost a fun game, if he thought about it that way. He still wanted more (he always wanted more), but the attention required to keep from overstepping helped him keep his mind off it. Sort of. Petting Prowl! That was a good thing! 

And Prowl was liking it! 

He didn’t  _ do _ anything that would indicate liking, but Jazz could tell the difference between just-humoring-you-until-I-shred-you-to-pieces being ignored and ignoring-you-because-I-don’t-feel-like-complimenting-you being ignored. Success! Now if he could just get Prowl to  _ reciprocate. _ Again, he knew better than to try to initiate anything sexual, so he needed to get Prowl to initiate. Usually that meant annoying him, but he was hoping to do it without the pain this time. For now at least.

Despite the movement, the tentacles were soon clean and Jazz was wondering if he could move on to  _ cleaning _ other parts of Prowl’s frame. Not the doors, no, and definitely not his panel… but maybe his claws?

“Give me your hand?”

There was a brief curling of the tentacles in threat, but Prowl didn’t suspiciously ask “why?” or show any other hesitation. He rolled over so he could curl up facing Jazz and lifted his hand to be grasped.

In this form, it almost didn’t look like a mech’s hand at all. The articulation was dextrous enough, Jazz supposed, but almost all of the construction was focused on his massive claws. Meant for hooking into prey and tearing even the thickest armor to shreds, the claws themselves took up almost half the length of his whole hand; the rest of his hand and many of the structures in his wrists, arms and even shoulders, were dedicated to supporting their weight and giving them strength.

They were also very dirty.

“You have really awesome claws,” Jazz said, using his smaller ones to begin cleaning the magnificent weapons. 

Prowl grunted in acknowledgement.

_ …Please pet me with them?  _

Prowl didn’t do that. Didn’t even indicate he might at some point in the future, either as a reward for this task Jazz was taking on or because he felt like it or for any reason at all. But he let Jazz continue.

_ It wasn’t enough! _

It was enough for now.

“I like your claws,” Jazz praised again, scratching away a smear of something that could be dirt or sewer sludge but was probably dead energon as he worked his way up from the tips. “They are some of the most,”  _ don’t say pretty, _ “efficient killing tools I’ve ever seen.”

Prowl grunted in acknowledgement again, and Jazz wanted to feel a little flutter of pleasure badly enough that he almost did. Prowl wasn’t ignoring him!

Jazz did see the rather indulgently smug look in the sparkeater’s optics. He knew what Jazz wanted from this and had no intention of giving it to him, but was willing to take advantage of the free grooming (and praise) anyway. Fragger. And Jazz couldn’t even call him on it without inviting an attack! 

Did he want him to attack?

_ He wanted him to frag him! _

Maybe he should poke and annoy Prowl into doing it. That worked. That almost always worked! Doing this gentle, reciprocity thing  _ wasn’t _ working. Probably because Prowl was just waiting for his impatience to get the better of him, waiting for the awful emptiness to drive him to push too far so Prowl could do what  _ he  _ wanted instead of what Jazz wanted. 

Well it wasn’t going to work!

…for another ten minutes or so.

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	21. Tentacle Angst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short ficbit is short... but uncooperative prompt is uncooperative.

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Jazz knew something was off as soon as they returned to the network of sewer tunnels they were currently calling their nest. This far down, the tunnels flooded at the slightest provocation, but that wasn’t more than a cold, wet inconvenience to them. The living had more of a problem with it, which meant that none of the mechs who’d been driven into the storm drains looking for shelter ever came down this far. It was a good hiding spot.

It was clean. 

It wasn’t supposed to be clean.

Prowl strode into their lair without pause, but Jazz stopped at the edge of the tunnel. What was going on here?

“Master!” A mech with clean, healthy plating the color the locals painted patients of the district asylum quickly came out to greet them. Or Prowl. Because he was looking at Prowl; Jazz might not have existed to him. “I cleaned up while you were gone. And drew a bath. Now you can contemplate the tragedy of your continued existence and be clean at the same time!”

“Pfft. ‘The tragedy of his continued existence’?” Jazz laughed, both at the idea that Prowl considered any part of his un-life a tragedy and at the look on Prowl’s face over the surprise minion. Then he stopped laughing, because surprise minion. Prowl already had a minion! One he didn’t pay enough attention to as it was. “Get lost.”

Jazz was  _ not comforted _ when he saw Prowl’s tentacles curl in a thoughtful gesture.

“Please Master,” the mech said, ignoring Jazz completely. “There is no reason for your form to be uncomfortable, even if your spirit suffers.” 

“It’s been a long time since I’ve bothered to gather a cult. I’d only consider taking on a minion if it minded,” Prowl replied slowly. He stepped forward and placed one claw on the mech’s cheek gently. Tentacles curled in amusement.  _ Not minding _ was one of Jazz’s shortcomings, according to Prowl. “Can you obey?”

“Oh yes! I’ll do whatever you want me to! I’m here to make your un-life as comfortable as it can be. I will do all of the cleaning and all the repairs, and guard you when you are resting.”

“Hey!” That was Jazz’s job! Not the cleaning, admittedly, but the guarding was. Prowl didn’t need someone else to do that! “You can’t be serious about keeping it?” 

“It would make a very devoted and  _ obedient _ High Priest,” Prowl didn’t-answer. “Let’s go see this bath.”

“Of course Master! It took me a long time to heat up all the water, but I made sure it stayed warm for you until you returned! I even found some soap!” The new minion trotted off happily. Prowl followed, doorwings set at a decidedly smug angle.

Behind them Jazz seethed.

A minute later the ‘high priest’ returned, looking around the tunnel that passed as a room curiously. “Master sent me to fetch a towel. He said there was one in here. Then he wants me to join him in the bath! Isn’t that exciting?”

“Very,” Jazz bit out, claws clenching at his sides. Prowl was going to let this delusional imbecile into the bath with him?! No fair! He never let Jazz do anything like that!

“Do you know where the towel is?”

“I do.” He did. He knew exactly where it was, but he wasn’t about to tell this, this… Jazz’s ire vanished and he laughed again. “This way,” he said, reaching out to guide the  _ prey  _ into the perfect position to—

“Aaaeeeeii!”

Its shrieks echoed off the walls, amplified by the acoustics of the tunnels. It tried to get away too, but Jazz wasn’t having it. No way was he letting this thing live to be Prowl’s minion! Although, letting it live just enough to be Prowl’s snack… With difficulty he pulled back and withdrew his siphon before its fuel pump stopped and its spark totally lost access to power. He would  _ share _ his prey! He could obey the rules!

A few minutes later Jazz walked back to where the bath was set up, barely-conscious prey on one arm and the towel over the other. “Take out and a napkin?” he offered with a pleased grin.

Prowl didn’t look upset at the demise of his new ‘high priest’ at all. “I knew you were capable of learning the rules if given the right incentive, pet. Hold it for me while I eat. Then join me.”

_ Yes!  _ “You got it, boss.”

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	22. Tie Up The Tentacles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soo… Extra warning for noncon in this one. Be safe.

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The dust started to clear and Jazz peeked up from where he’d dove when the rusted ceiling had cracked open. Debris was still raining down, but it had slowed to a soft trickle of pebbles and fine particles. 

A mortal might have coughed to clear his engine.

“Prowl?” The lighting had already been bad (read: nonexistent) and now there was absolutely no seeing through the choked atmosphere. “Where are you?”

Somewhere behind him, Jazz heard the debris shift, heard claws on metal and stone. The stones settled again as the scratching stopped. “Right here,” Prowl answered. His voice was muffled, but it was enough to home in on. The problem was reaching him without triggering another collapse!

Three tries later, Jazz finally managed to climb over the wreckage successfully. “Wow. You blend right in.”

Prowl had already stretched out into his monstrous form to better take advantage of his strength and leverage to free himself. The problem was that he was almost covered by a single heavy stone that was squishing his shoulders into the floor, keeping his claws from doing more than twitching at the ends of his fingers. His tentacles were all pinned too. Two were almost crushed by the weight that had landed on him. 

He couldn’t bring any of his deadly blades to bear.

He was helpless… 

Prowl glared up at him. “Don’t just stand there, pet. Push this off.”

Jazz looked at it. Looked at Prowl. Looked at the stone again. He could push it off, yes, but then Prowl wouldn’t be helpless anymore. It was such a rare occurrence that he wasn’t in a hurry to end it. As if he could tell what Jazz was thinking, Prowl snarled, lunging as best he could. Jazz flinched back, but it wasn’t needed because Prowl was suuuuuper stuck.

“You,” Jazz said slowly, wondering if saying it out loud would ruin it, “can’t make me.”

“Do you believe  _ stone _ will hold me forever, pet?” Prowl snarled. He flexed and the entire pile shifted, and a few small stones fell from the pile and tumbled to Jazz’s feet. He dug furrows into the ground with his claws. His point was clear. It may take a very looooong time, but Prowl would work himself free eventually. “And if you do not  _ do as you are told _ I will hunt you from one end of the universe to the other, shred your form to pieces and cast whatever is left of your spirit into the Emptiness from which you were spawned!” 

“Yeah.” There was that. “Rather you didn’t do that.” But for once, Jazz had a golden opportunity to  _ bargain.  _ “What if I do do as I’m told though? What’s my reward?”

“I let you  _ live.” _

“Oh?” Jazz knew what Prowl meant, but it gave him ideas. Living meant more than just existing, it meant experiencing, feeling and fun and fuel (always fuel) and fragging. “Does that mean I can frag you for a change?”

_ “No!” _

“But that’d really be living!” Excited by the prospect, Jazz circled around behind Prowl to see how buried his aft was. Not, as it turned out! Which meant he would probably try to kick him, but his feet were nowhere near as dangerous as the blades and claws that couldn’t hurt him right now. Jazz could deal with his feet. And ohhhh, one doorwing was sticking up out of the rubble! His own claws twitched eagerly as Jazz climbed on top of him and reached for it.

It twitched invitingly. Jazz saw the tentacles under it writhe impotently as he stroked it. Niiice. 

“I’m going to rip every inch of your plating off and feed it back to you through your siphon as a thousand blades,” Prowl hissed, which… Hey, that wasn’t pleasant to think about but he wasn’t threatening to cast his spirit into Emptiness. Or even kill him anymore. So…  _ positive? _ Definitely positive. Practically permission!

Jazz went ahead and brushed the small pieces of debris pinning down and blocking access to Prowl’s other doorwing, freeing it for him to play with. They were the same dead metal as the rest of Prowl, but unlike the rest of him, they were pretty much just decorative — with the emphasis on pretty. “Have I told you I like these?”

“You’re going to be using your own femoral struts as those stupid flutes you like for  _ centuries,” _ Prowl didn’t answer. 

Jazz ignored the threat. They were still in the realm of non-lethal so he felt like ignoring the threat was a totally valid unlife choice right now. Certainly not nearly as fun to contemplate as the smooth panels under his hands. He imagined ripping them off. Prowl didn’t bleed, but he could be injured, feel pain. It was, Jazz reassured himself, totally natural to contemplate being the one in charge, the one ripping  _ Prowl _ to shreds for once. He tugged, bending the doors so that he could see the hinges and joints and wires connecting them to his back. He imagined what they would look like if he bent them just a liiiiittle bit more… 

Prowl tensed and heaved. The debris pile shifted again. A tentacle flailed and stabbed itself into the ground close to Jazz’s leg, then slowly withdrew from the stone. Unable to reach, but closer than he could have hit a second ago.

Riiiiight. He could fantasize about ripping Prowl to shreds, but there were still boundaries here, lines a mere Empty could not cross with a sparkeater if he wanted to continue existing any length of time. 

He hoped fragging him wasn’t crossing one of them, because there was no way he wasn’t doing  _ that  _ while he had the chance.

“What is it you’re always telling me?” Jazz asked rhetorically, trailing a hand down Prowl’s elongated spine toward his panel. “‘Open this or I tear it off’?”

Jazz heard claws digging into the stone. One of Prowl’s feet lashed out, but he couldn’t bend enough to come close to where Jazz was perched behind and above him. “If you even  _ think _ about sticking your filthy spike in me, I will weld a muzzle into your jaw and lead your starving, rusted husk on a leash until the muzzle rots away naturally.” 

Still non lethal. Worth it. Jazz dug his claws into the seams and with a spark of glee-like feeling at being the one to  _ do _ damage for once, ripped Prowl’s modesty armor clean off.

If he’d been hoping for a scream, he’d have been disappointed because all Prowl did was hiss out a vicious curse/threat in some language Jazz didn’t know. Luckily it was Prowl himself who liked his victims to scream; Jazz liked it when they  _ struggled,  _ and Prowl fought him something fierce. He almost didn’t even need to “stick his filthy spike in him” to get satisfaction from this!

He still did it anyway.

“Oh yeah…” It wasn’t like a mortal valve, which were wet and hot and clenched deliciously with each struggle or thrust. Prowl’s valve was smooth and cool and dry and still clenched deliciously around Jazz’s spike as he struggled. He pulled almost out, then pushed back in just so he could enjoy entering Prowl again. 

His hands went back to Prowl’s doors as he continued to thrust. Prowl tried to bat his questing fingers away with a series of rapid flaps, but Jazz grabbed them roughly and wrestled them into submission.  _ Submission!  _ From  _ Prowl!  _ It was so wonderful, so incredible it crowded out any and all other thoughts. For a moment, for one, perfect moment, there was nothing in the world or in Jazz’s head but this.

Then Prowl spat out another vicious-sounding curse. Reality reasserted itself, reminding him that he was hungry, empty, and going to be in a looooot of trouble if he didn’t start making himself useful.

Feeling more than just a  _ little _ satisfied with himself and his frag, Jazz went ahead and pulled out and scrambled over to the rock he was supposed to be moving. Prowl was glaring at him, baring his teeth hatefully, but he didn’t look any more murderous than, you know, normal.

“I am going to feed you just enough to keep you aware of how your form decays around you while I drag you around like a shadow,” the sparkeater hissed. “You will be awake for every, single, passing second of your punishment,  _ pet.” _

Okay maybe a little bit more murderous than normal. Jazz hummed happily as he pushed against the rock. Still totally worth it.

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	23. "Don't Stop"

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Prowl paused his rhythm to concentrate on his quivering parchment. This was a particularly tricky part of the “spell”. He’d learned it as a spell, but knew even then that it called on no real magical power. Still, flesh eaters had an aversion to the symbols, and that needed no power or prayer to work. 

“Don’t stop,” Jazz moaned, squirming under him. 

“Hold  _ still,” _ Prowl snarled pushing his weight against the Empty to enforce the command. All but one of his limbs had already been splayed out and impaled to pin them in place, but his pet was still managing to wriggle inconveniently. At Jazz’s insistence he’d shoved his spike in his valve for this, but Prowl needed to concentrate! He couldn’t be bothered catering to Jazz’s inane, compulsive desire for pleasure at the same time! “This is delicate!”

“Nnnnnngh.” Jazz flexed his claws fitfully and whined. “Is that why you keep stopping?”

“Yes,” Prowl barked, narrowing his optics. If Jazz even  _ thought _ about trying to disrupt this on purpose, he’d toss him outside for the flesh eaters to  _ have. _ Jazz was the only reason they needed these things anyway. On his own, he’d walk out of here and the sniveling ghouls would part like flesh under his tentacle blades to let him pass. Unlike  _ certain Empties, _ flesh eaters generally knew where they sat on the hierarchy of Cybertron’s various supernatural predators.

Perhaps some of that frustration communicated itself. Jazz didn’t stop making noise, but he did stop fidgeting and squirming. “Please just don’t stop completely then, if you have to go slow?”

Prowl ignored the plea. Carefully he finished carving the complicated symbol and began thrusting disinterestedly as he filled the cuts with the iridescent niobium oxide pigment they’d found while exploring the ruin. He used a tamp to pack it in so that the dust created a solid layer that filled the wound and stopped Jazz’s messy bleeding. The thus-far completed runes of the spell gleamed a multitude of colors in the moonlight.

Obviously the pigment  _ hurt  _ to have packed in like that, but Prowl felt it was only fair he should get something out of having to do this. He’d first contemplated etching the lines in with acid rather than carving them with a knife for that reason, but as he was  _ trying  _ to impress on Jazz, precision mattered and dripping acid was hard to control. He could have painted on the lines with an acid resistant wax and then  _ thrown _ Jazz into the acid, but they didn’t have enough of it. Or the acid resistant wax. Or a paintbrush. Prowl hummed contentedly as Jazz finally screamed, which wouldn’t have been as satisfying to hear if he’d been inside a vat anyway. 

Maybe another time.

Of course he  _ could _ have just added the pigment to a paint and painted the symbols onto Jazz to the same effect, but they didn’t have any of that either.

Thrusting a few more times with his spike, Prowl cleaned off his blade, then paused so he could start carving the next symbol. 

“H-how many more?” Jazz asked, gasping through the pain.

“About twenty,” Prowl answered absently, most of his attention on the symbol. “Then they need to be connected into the diagram of the Spark, Armor, and Gaze of the creator.” The Gaze was especially elaborate, tracing out constellations so old the stars had moved on and mortals had long forgotten that the diagrams had once been a map of the sky.

“Twenty?” A shiver ran through Jazz’s frame. “Pleeeeease…!”

Rolling his optics, Prowl flicked the ichor off of his blade and resumed thrusting as he started again with the pigment. The sex didn’t do anything for him. He didn’t derive any pleasure from it for himself, and it was really kind of boring if Jazz wasn’t shrieking or thrashing. These brief bursts of screaming were fun when they happened, but really not enough to offset how much of a  _ chore _ this unending fragging was. Maybe he should just get a stick and Jazz could pleasure himself… but then he’d  _ move _ and mess up Prowl’s work. Prowl sighed and thrust a little harder, tamping the pigment into the new wounds.

Jazz bit his lip until it bled as the pigment burned, then finally screamed again.

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	24. Domestic Tentacles

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Prowl was not often fastidious with their lairs, but when he did take issue with the mess it was hilarious to watch. The  _ expression _ on his face as he speared one fluid-covered toy so that he wouldn’t have to touch the thing with his fingers… Jazz snickered.

He almost wished he hadn’t when Prowl glared at him. 

He wasn’t sure if cowering would appease Prowl right now, or incite him to pounce. He cowered anyway, squeaking in theatrical  _ don’t hurt me _ panic. Maybe Prowl would decide to take his weird frustration with their mess out on him for causing it, start ripping pieces off. Maybe Prowl would tell him beg in fear and leave it at that. 

_ Splat! _

Jazz looked up to find the toy had been flicked from the blade and smacked into the wall. From there, it fell wetly into the pile with the rest of the rubbish. Prowl had decided to ignore him.

That was probably for the best. He really shouldn’t be testing that.

_ Splat!  _

Jazz snickered again.

“This is your mess,” Prowl snarled, barely touching something he’d decided was too disgusting to even risk spearing with the very tip of the blade so he could slide it across the floor. “You could  _ help.” _

“I don’t know what you want moved where,” Jazz argued. Prowl called it a mess, but he didn’t see anything wrong with the place. “What if I just make things worse?”

“Everything that has one of your various  _ fluids _ on it goes over there,” he flicked the rag into pile. “I’m going to burn it and the leftover energon later.”

“Ugh, and fill the lair with  _ smoke?”  _ Talk about making a mess! And just think what the neighbors would have to say if they thought the house was on fire. “Wait, no, whatever you’re thinking of doing to me, there’s no need. I’ll clean. See?” Jazz got up and walked over to the bed. “This is me, cleaning.”

“Watch where you’re walking!” the sparkeater snapped. “I don’t want to have to try and burn out all the flooring again!”

“Just put a rug down over it.” Seriously, what was with him? Still, Jazz made the effort to pick up his feet. “Everything with fluids on it, huh?”

“All of it. It’s disgusting. I refuse to  _ squelch _ when I walk in here!” 

_ It didn’t seem to bother you yesterday, _ Jazz thought, but he did recognize this mood, rare and random as it was. There would be no deterring, reasoning, or negotiating with Prowl right now.

“A  _ rug,” _ Prowl continued kicking several piles closer to the to-be-burned pile, which forced Jazz to scramble to rescue some of his sheet music, “would be  _ harder _ to clean and soak up  _ more _ of your foul, nasty…  _ odious _ leftovers!” He paused, considered. “It would be easier to burn than trying to replace the flooring again though. We’ll get a nice big one  _ after _ I’ve finished burning all of this.” 

“Yes. My thoughts exactly,” Jazz lied glibly. Now that he was looking, there really were all kinds of fluids all over the place. Someone was a messy eater! He blamed Prowl. There was no need to tear such big holes in people! It just <strike>wasted</strike> got energon everywhere. Not that he would try saying as much to Prowl. 

Primly, Prowl kicked another pile of accumulated things over to be burned, flicking stray items closer with his tentacles. Jazz squawked and rescued more of his music and even the violin he’d stolen!

Prowl huffed. “If you don’t like how I’m doing it, then you do it. You have a crate,” he pointed to a pile actually made up of four crates on the other side of the room. “Anything not in them when I get back is fair game. I’m going to get a metal trash can or something to start the fire in.”

“Feel free to take your time.” He had a lot of stuff to save!

Prowl just sniffed haughtily and pulled his tentacles under his brightly painted and meticulously maintained armor as he turned to stalk out the door. Jazz did a double take, though, when several of the writhing shadows of his tentacles didn’t disappear when the appendages did. He’d only seen it a handful of times, but it  _ looked _ like the very first stage of a new sparkeater’s development had started!

“Whyyyyyyy,” Jazz whined to the corpses as he rolled them over, searching for things to put in the crates. “I don’t want to deal with another one.” Actually, more to the point, he didn’t want to deal with Prowl while he made another one. More random decisions and cranky mood swings while Prowl fought the process, then prepared for it, then chose a victim,  _ plus _ putting up with his overprotective brooding while he waited for his chosen victim to die (all the while not letting Jazz eat it!) was not Jazz’s idea of a good time. Last time this had happened he’d refused to frag at  _ all  _ until the thing was finished transforming. He hadn’t even hunted, just expected Jazz to go out and bring prey back to him until the  _ baby _ had woken up.

And  _ then _ Prowl turned vicious and lashed out to drive his offspring out of their territory. He expected Jazz to  _ help _ with that, not that Jazz was much good in a fight against a clingy sparkeater that was simultaneously trying to reconcile what its mortal memories said it should be feeling for a “parent” and trying to take said parent’s territory. But if he didn’t help Prowl lashed out at him. If he did help, he had a high chance of being collateral damage because Prowl wasn’t paying great attention to what he was doing.

Which, Jazz supposed, kicking the two, as-yet undisposed of corpses into the to-be-burned pile, was the worst thing about this whole process: Prowl  _ didn’t pay attention to him. _

“Someone really ought to remind him he’s an undead horror and not a fragging home maker,” Jazz grumbled, piling his music, his violin, and a large assortment of knick-knacks into the crates. He would have ransacked the room for more things to save, but he could hear Prowl’s footsteps on the stairs accompanied by the metallic rattling of the trash can.

Not interested in taking any chances, Jazz hopped into the last crate himself so Prowl couldn’t call  _ him  _ fair game for the fire. He didn’t really fit, but he managed to stand, balanced, so that none of his limbs stuck out into the room. He was  _ technically _ in the crate!

Prowl ignored him as he lumbered in with his makeshift fire pit. He kicked aside a pile of stuff Jazz might have liked to at least consider for salvaging to make room on the floor and started piling stuff in, alternating between moderately flammable “fluid soaked” things and cubes of spoiled energon that would get the blaze going hot and keep it there. 

He still had the sense to rip out the smoke detector with one tentacle before he cackled maniacally and lit the match.

It was, admittedly, fun to watch the colorful, dancing flames.

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	25. In The Bedroom

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The bedroom was nice. Very nice. Prowl didn’t often get to lair up somewhere nice. He usually didn’t care, but sometimes… Mmm… He wiggled against the expensive silversilk sheets just to feel the slide of smooth cloth against his dead plating. It kind of reminded him of the lamiae’s castle. They had had some nice things too.

It was fitting for a lair they were going to inhabit for a while. Prowl had worked hard to acquire this one legitimately and without suspicion. It had gone up for sale and Prowl had managed to buy it online. Sight unseen, of course, aside from the pictures in the listing. This was his first time inside and he was pleased with how it was measuring up. The family that had owned it technically still had a couple weeks to move out. Most of their belongings were in boxes; Prowl had already sent the moving truck away. No one would question that they had disappeared. 

A lot of work for a very satisfying reward. Prowl felt their sparks still buzzing around in his tank, terrified and trying to comfort each other as they were digested. He felt great. 

“Hey Prowl! Where’d you go?”

Ah. Right. Jazz was in the house too. “Here,” Prowl called out so he wouldn’t have to listen to him clomping around looking for him.

“Where’s here? Are you— hi!” A clawed hand appeared on the doorframe, followed shortly by the rest of the Empty. Apart from the flecks of energon (and other fluids) marring his paint job, he looked every inch the proud new homeowner. “Now there’s a nice bed.”

“Which you’re not touching,” Prowl insisted firmly. It was  _ his _ bed and he didn’t want Jazz’s icky fluids on it. “Mine.”

“What? There’s plenty of room for both of us on that one, even with you all sprawled out.” The leer Jazz was giving him was as unwelcome as he was. “Just think what we could do on that bed…”

Prowl “sprawled” out more so that there was  _ definitely _ no room for Jazz and tilted his blades in  _ threat. _ Unfortunately, hunting in such a populous, well surveiled area meant Jazz’s social skills would be needed so Prowl…  _ shouldn’t _ maim him. “No. You have a bed.” 

“You mean that dinky thing downstairs?” Jazz made a face. “This one’s so much nicer! And it’d be a lot nicer to share than to sleep alone.”

“You messed it up, you get it.” Prowl rolled to his feet and stood, blocking Jazz and herding him back out the door. “Shoo. We have a nice big house, with plenty of space. Go… ” Prowl strained to think of something Jazz could do that wasn’t hunting (they needed to carefully manage the deaths in this area or risk being driven out of their nice lair), fragging (ditto), torture (ditto), or… what else was there? Prowl clawed at the air a couple of times trying to think… “Go clean up that mess in the front room and stash the bodies somewhere,” he commanded, finally thinking of something. “It needs to be presentable for when the neighbors get curious.” 

They’d have to get some new things. The neighbors would realize something was up if they just reused all of the previous owners’ things. All Prowl could think of was salvaging some stuff from the dumpsters they occasionally stashed bodies in, but maybe Jazz would have another idea. Later.

“Presentable. Right. I can do that. And then,” Jazz asked hopefully, not making any move toward the stairs, “I can join you in bed?”

_ No. _ “Take a bath and I’ll  _ think _ about it,” Prowl said instead. 

Or he could just ambush Jazz downstairs and nail him to his own bed. That was an option too. Prowl  _ liked _ that option.

Jazz, of course, liked the implication that he  _ might  _ get what he wanted enough to smile and take off down the stairs with a chipper “Yessir!”

Prowl debated lurking on the stairs for that ambush, but if Jazz actually cleaned up and disposed of the bodies it would take a while, and the silky sheets were calling to him.

Stretching out so that he was comfortably in his true form, Prowl slithered back into the bed and stretched out his tentacles until he took up the whooole space. 

Hours later, Prowl had long stopped wiggling just to revel the texture of the nice, silky sheets and had settled into a more normal rest cycle. The consumed sparks had stopped banging around in his tank and were losing their different personalities as they broke down into energy. They were becoming nothing but a nutritious soup of undifferentiated despair and regret and fear and pain… Prowl was feeling pleased and lethargic when he heard Jazz creeping back into the room. 

“Prowl?” Prowl ignored him. He crept closer. “I did everything you said. Can I get in the bed with you?”

Prowl continued to ignore him.

Taking that as permission (it wasn’t, but it wasn’t worth disrupting his pleasant rest cycle to kick him out), Jazz slid into the bed and under his tentacles. He made a pleased sound when Prowl moved them to get them more comfortable resting coiled on top of his body instead of flat on the bed. 

A hand petted hopefully along the edge of his doorwing.

“Stop that,” Prowl muttered, punctuating the command with a threatening poke from one of his blades. 

Jazz audibly pouted. “I wanna frag.”

“Too bad. Try and touch me again and I’ll,” what was the word? “crucify you to the wall.”

Jazz paused, thinking about that. “Promise?”

“I  _ won’t _ frag you while I do it.”

Jazz pouted and cuddled up to Prowl’s side and settled into his own version of rest. Eventually he wouldn’t be able to resist, and then Prowl would go ahead and crucify him, but for now… They were well fed and had a new lair, and if Prowl could just keep Jazz’s excesses under control for a while…

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Magnolia_in_black_Velvet remarked how much Prowl and Jazz are behaving like a cat and a dog about the bed, and then drew art of it [here](https://nightalp.tumblr.com/post/188769403083/try-and-touch-me-again-and-ill-crucify-you-to)!! They're so horribly adorable/adorably horrible, these two <3


	26. "I Can Explain"

Ratchet glared at the email in his inbox. It was an addendum to his receipt for the online purchase of a book he was not proud of getting. The latest in a long line of books on monsters, stories and hauntings. Alpha Trion had warned him that these were cleaned up publications, produced to entertain the masses, not to inform, but everything  _ he _ set aside for Ratchet was so steeped in religious symbology and ritual it was just as useless. 

After his close call with the lair in the slums, he’d decided he needed to cast a wider net even if it made him look even  _ more _ like a crackpot. He didn’t know what use  _ The Terrible Tales of the Ten Most HAUNTED Places in Iacon _ could be to him, but what he knew about monsters could be written on a price tag with room to spare. He didn’t even know  _ what _ he didn’t know!

Except that the advertised forum linked under the “If you liked  _ The Terrible Tales  _ we think you’ll also like” header would be full of actual crackpots. That much he did know.

But what if… Once the thought occurred he couldn’t escape it, and Ratchet found himself wondering. What if, in amongst the crackpots and the crazies, was someone else who had experience with the real thing? Ironhide thought  _ Ratchet _ was a crackpot, and all he’d claimed was that Empties existed. Which was true. 

Cringing, Ratchet clicked the link. There went his browser history.

His first impression of the  _ PARANORMAL INVESTIGATORS RESOURCE _ forum was… not as terrible as he’d expected. Someone who liked optic-searingly bright green and was probably obsessed with ghosts had chosen the site header image, but someone else with functioning optics had made sure the font color and other design elements were readable against the site’s dark background. A degree of organization was immediately apparent too. Ratchet was able to navigate to the FAQ page right away, where the first question was, helpfully, “New to the paranormal? No problem!” with a link to another page on “The Basics”.

Paranormal phenomena, paranormal beings, paranormal defenses… There were a lot of categories, but while “The Basics” gave a brief overview of everything listed, he encountered several prompts to sign in to view further information. “Membership is free!” the site promised. 

“Free” was a relative term, Ratchet knew. The site was ad supported. Right now the margins were for items of general “paranormal” interest, like Festival of Mortilus costumes, knick knacks, popular supernatural themed novels… Creating an account would allow the advertisers to target him more specifically as the site collected data from the pages he visited. It’d also allow other users to PM him and he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to people who wrote  _ fanfiction _ about romancing ghosts or the sex lives of monsters.

He was going to have to, though, if he wanted to see if there was anything here worth his time.

“No one on here knows who you are,” he reminded himself. “And you can always delete the account later.”

He struggled to come up with a username that wasn’t just a variation on his own name, or something he’d used before in the past. Finally he typed in  _ Wombattalion, _ which was one of Ironhide’s long-abandoned gaming alts. Of course the name was taken, so he put a random string of numbers after it, typed then re-typed his chosen password, and hit  _ Enter. _

“Welcome Investigator Wombattalion334972! You are now  _ Recruit _ rank!” the pop up window announced. Ratchet skimmed the forum rules and the list of privileges a “Recruit” — responding to existing threads, posting new threads in existing boards, choosing one of several stock avatars, and displaying his recruit’s insignia under his name and avatar in the sidebar — had then closed it.

He was almost surprised when he didn’t immediately receive a dozen PMs asking if he’d like to participate in a kinky roleplay. 

Returning to “The Basics”, Ratchet continued without the annoying sign-in prompts. After clicking around a bit to get a sense of what was there — a  _ lot,  _ as it turned out; practically everything had a scroll bar — he decided to read the expanded overview on sparkeaters first. The first several paragraphs detailed different possible origins for the monsters, summarizing where and when sparkeaters had been prominent across Cybertron. That part he skimmed over; it didn’t matter where they’d come from, or how, when or why. He could get plenty on that from Alpha Trion if he really wanted, but he didn’t, so he wasn’t going to waste his time on it here either. This section on sparkeater abilities though… It was broken up into two categories, “Attributed” and “Confirmed”, complete with reference links. 

The ability to read, Ratchet noticed, was in the “Confirmed” category. This was despite the fact that the ability to blend in with normal Cybertronians was still a hotly debated topic, with some insisting they could while others maintained that they were one of those creatures that could not hide its truly monstrous features.

Before he had a chance to really dig into what these people considered typical sparkeater abilities, however, he received the first dreaded PM.

_ NoGunsNoSwords: Hello! You’re new here, aren’t you? Care to help me with a research project? _

“Research project” indeed. Ratchet ignored the message and continued reading. Or, rather, he tried to continue reading and the messages just kept on coming.

_ NoGunsNoSwords: Please? I just have a couple of questions! _

_ NoGunsNoSwords: It won’t take long! _

_ NoGunsNoSwords: Just a couple of minutes! _

_ NoGunsNoSwords: Then I’ll leave you alone, promise. _

_ NoGunsNoSwords: *conspiratorial whisper* It’s about sparkeaters! _

NoGunsNoSwords must be one of the site admins, since the only way he could know Ratchet was interested in sparkeaters was by accessing his browsing history. He should just keep ignoring the messages, or even look up who the other admins were to report him. It was overbearing and stalkerish… But Ratchet was intrigued despite himself. 

Telling himself just how much he was probably going to regret this, he hit “Reply”.

_ Wombattalion334972: What about sparkeaters? _

The response came so close on the heels of Ratchet’s message that it had probably already been typed before he even hit send.

_ NoGunsNoSwords: Have you ever seen a sparkeater in person? _

That wasn’t too bad, as a question.  _ No, _ he typed back. Because of Alpha Trion’s records, he thought he knew what one was supposed to look like — a parody of a mech’s form, covered in razor sharp edges and protrusions, teeth and claws and up to a hundred tentacles bursting out of its frame — but he’d never seen one.  _ Have you? _

_ NoGunsNoSwords: Only from a distance. Really that’s the best way to see one if you don’t want to get eaten, but I need to get closer to test my latest prototype and I can’t find one! _

_ Wombattalion334972: I can’t help you there. _

Ratchet didn’t even, one-hundred percent, know the lair in the Dead End had belonged to a sparkeater, just that Alpha Trion had said the Empties with the ripped-out chests had been killed by one.

_ NoGunsNoSwords: You could help me look for one! Where are you located? _

Okay that was too much from some crazy he didn’t know. Ratchet started poking through the menus trying to find a way to block messages from NoGunsNoSwords.

The messages kept coming while he looked, of course. Something about adding him to a surveillance network and the need for a body to test a “sparkeater gun”, whatever that was. Ratchet didn’t bother reading all that closely, though he did find it ironic that a mech with NoGuns in his username was working on a custom blaster. Because of that, he almost missed when another username appeared in the list. 

_ [Wheeljack]: Hello! Welcome to the community. I’m one of the admins, and I wanted to send a quick warning about one of our more fanatical members. Please let me know if NoGunsNoSwords starts harassing you - you’ll probably run into him if you spend any time on the sparkeater or sightings boards. _

Oh thank Primus. Ratchet hit “Reply”.  _ As it happens I would appreciate a rescue right now. _

_ [Wheeljack]: Right now? Wow, he didn’t waste any time, did he? Hang on a sec. _

Ratchet waited and, sure enough, the torrent of messages from NoGunsNoSwords stopped.

_ [Wheeljack]: Okay, he’s been put on time-out. Do you want me to block him for you too? _

Ratchet didn’t want to make enemies here, even if he could delete his account at any time.  _ Only if he won’t stop after this, _ he decided, typing it in.  _ He’d only just started trying to get personal. _

_ [Wheeljack]: Alright. Sorry about him. Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with or if you’d like to chat.  _

Wheeljack seemed so much saner than NoGuns even on first impression, and Ratchet  _ had _ come here to try and connect up with others like himself, who had actual experience or information about the supernatural…

_ What do you know about sparkeaters? _ he typed in quickly and hit send before he could talk himself out of it.

_ [Wheeljack]: Sparkeaters huh? They’re definitely dangerous. NOT something you should seek out or take on alone. Physically speaking they’re stronger than a lot of other undead and, more importantly, faster. They’re strategic hunters too, though fortunately they’re also pretty solitary. If you don’t mind me asking, are you just curious or do you think there might be one hunting in your neighborhood? (no you don’t have to say where that neighborhood is) _

_ Wombattalion334972: I don’t know. I’ve been dealing with Empties, but someone I know said the chests being ripped out was a sparkeater thing. _

Not that he’d been seeing any of those since he’d found the abandoned lair. Even the number of new Empties had dropped off dramatically, and he’d traced those there were to older contamination sites rather than new kills. Though, he imagined that if he hadn’t purified all the sites as he’d found them, the number of Empties would have just kept growing until… until what, he didn’t know. 

_ [Wheeljack]: It’s not exclusively sparkeater, but chests ripped open is a thing they do. As the name suggests, it’s the spark they go after in their victims. Empties don’t usually bother going through thick armor since all they want is the energon, so you probably do have something more than them going on. _

That confirmed what Alpha Trion had said. 

_ I found what I thought was its lair. I’m scared, _ he typed in quickly before he could talk himself out of it.  _ I found an advertisement for my workplace in the refuse. I’d been looking for months, and… _ Ratchet didn’t know what else to add, so he deleted the word and ended the sentence there.  _ I’m looking for help. _

He hit send.

It felt like forever before Wheeljack’s reply came through.

_ [Wheeljack]: Looking for help is the best thing you could be doing right now. What KIND of help do you want? Again, not trying to pry for personal info, but there are Hunter groups in almost every major city on Cybertron and they all have a Contact Me page here if you just want to let someone know who can try to deal with it for you. Or are you just looking for ways to keep yourself safe? _

Ratchet felt a little dizzy. After trying to glean the barest information out of myths and legends and the instruction manuals for exorcisms, the idea that there were  _ groups _ dedicated to doing this…  _ I’m not looking to pass responsibility, _ he typed.  _ And I can’t change workplaces. _ So there wasn’t much he could do about the fact that it/they/whatever knew who he was and that he was after them.  _ Beyond that, yes, I’d like to know how to keep myself and those around me safe. I’d like to get rid of the pests, if possible. _

_ I think they left my immediate area when I found the lair, _ he continued.  _ I haven’t seen the same signs since then. I have some ideas of where they might have gone, but I’m still adapting to the idea that not all monsters are shuffle-grrrr-fuuuuueel. _

_ [Wheeljack]: It is the stereotype, isn’t it? But the shuffle-grrrr-fuuuueel ones are only the most common and most easily dealt with of the undead. You’re thinking the advertisement wasn’t in the lair by chance? That they identified you as a possible threat to them? _

_ Wombattalion334972: It  _ ** _could_ ** _ have been chance, but I found other things that seemed to indicate intelligence so I don’t want to assume it’s a coincidence. _

Besides, he printed off the flyers mostly to circulate inside the Towers, to solicit donations. The slum dwellers mostly couldn’t read, so it would be very weird for them to have one, even without the monster connection.

_ [Wheeljack]: Well, your safest bet when dealing with the unknown is generally to assume the worst. Better overprepared than under when it comes to this stuff. The worst in your case… you found the lair of a sparkeater that knows you were tracking it, but it moved on rather than coming after you. If you don’t continue pursuing it, you aren’t likely to encounter it again. There’s plenty of debate on the subject of sparkeaters holding grudges (on this very forum even!) but statistically speaking, most of their victims are attacks of opportunity. It’s like… _

There was another pause. Ratchet waited, wondering if it was safe to feel relieved.

_ [Wheeljack]: The best way I can explain it is to think of them as predators. Because they are, it’s just that what they hunt and kill is US so it’s scary and weird to think about it like that but bear with me. Being a predator isn’t easy and confrontations are expensive in terms of energy.  _

So it — assuming it was a sparkeater — probably wasn’t stalking him, waiting to ambush him or Ironhide as they went about their daily lives. That really was a relief. What it didn’t do anything about was the fact that the monster was still out there, horribly killing unsuspecting mechs.

_ [Wheeljack]: The few survivor accounts you’ll find here kind of bear this out: if you escape, you aren’t hunted down later. But if you’re going to keep doing this hunting thing, tracking it specifically, eventually you might become a nuisance worth confronting. A predator has to defend a good hunting ground. It sounds like your territory was becoming infested with Empties. That might be why it moved, instead of standing its ground against you. So if you follow it to its new, better hunting ground…  _

Right. 

_ Wombattalion334972: I better be prepared then. How do you kill them? _

_ [Wheeljack]: I’ll send you to our list of hunting organizations and links to their websites. You can find the one closest to you and call or email them. Good luck. If you manage, make sure you post your story here to help others with their hunts, ‘kay? _

Ratchet snorted at that last line. “In other words, no one here's ever killed one, good luck, have fun.” Like he was foolhardy enough to try something like that any time soon. Still, it looked like the forum actually was going to be a useful resource after all.

As long as he avoided talking to NoGunsNoSwords again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3 guesses who NoGunsNoSwords is XD
> 
> [Wheeljack] is using his name rather than a screen name because he's an admin and he's not afraid to associate his real identity with crackpot ghost science. Also the only screen names I could think of for him were all Danny Phantom jokes because of my Crystal Ghosts stories.
> 
> ~Riz


	27. Tentacle Piercings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternatively titled _Why Prowl Hates The Internet_. XD

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The organization operating in Rodion called themselves the Monsterpikes. It was a dumb name, but Ratchet dragged Ironhide along to introduce himself anyway. He brought along photo scans of some pages out of some books Alpha Trion kept insisting were useful too, as a peace offering. 

Surprisingly, Ironhide actually clicked with the mechs immediately. At least he was having fun, even if he still thought they were all crazy. 

Their leader — who Ratchet had initially reached out to via email — had him explain the whole situation again, this time to the group. Ratchet gave them the texts outlining the myth of the “Mother of Empties”, showed them a copy of the music flier he’d made from memory, which was his only clue as to where his targets had gone.

Without knowing they were potentially related, someone else had brought newspaper clippings describing a series of spree killings in a nearby nightclub district he thought they needed to look into. The group as a whole agreed they were seeing more Empties than they’d come to expect as normal inside the walls around Rodion’s towers district. Ratchet was weirdly relieved. They were taking him seriously, he wasn’t crazy, and they were going to do something about this monster preying on his slum dwellers!

Kill reports, sightings, other strange happenings… no survivor reports, which worried the Monsterpikes. Survivors were the most reliable way of identifying just what sort of monster they were dealing with. An Empty, or several, was a given since it left Empties and contaminated  _ everything _ in its wake, but what else? This was not how Empties behaved! Everyone  _ thought _ sparkeater, just like Ratchet did, because of the ripped-out chests, but no one  _ knew. _ They needed to find out.

Ironhide didn’t believe they were looking for anything worse than a serial killer, but together he and Ratchet agreed to work with the hunters. He stopped suggesting they go to the Enforcers after the third time a glowing, walking corpse tried to eat him, but he still didn’t admit there were supernatural things at play. And Ratchet thought he’d been a skeptic! Ultimately it took two weeks to track down the new lair: the (thankfully!) unused basement of an upscale bar. After a quick planning session they took the risk of assaulting it in the middle of the day just like Ratchet had the previous lair.

Empty. Again.

Ratchet went through the accumulated detritus, trying to glean where their quarry had gone next. He found the abandoned music things just like the other lair. The only clue that really functioned as a lead was a collection of music disks for a band based out of Iacon. Taking only that information with them, they burned everything they could before they left. 

The Monsterpikes couldn’t go to Iacon, but they took to the investigators’ forum to network with the hunter group there. Ratchet took a sabbatical and, not up to eating the cost of a hotel stay that long, made plans to stay with his old friends Orion and Thunderclash in Iacon. Surprisingly Ironhide decided once again to follow along.

Orion and Thunderclash didn’t believe him about the supernatural reason for his visit, but that was okay. Ish. They didn’t try to get him committed anyway, which was what really mattered. Ratchet kept his conversation to “conspiracy theories lite” around them, much to Ironhide’s amusement. Whatever. They were both cops and Ratchet didn’t need them thinking they needed to  _ officially _ notice what the two of them were doing in Iacon. Crazy enough to be harmless was the name of the game. 

Outside of catching up with his friends, Ratchet and Ironhide began hooking up with the Nighthunters (Iacon’s version of the Monsterpikes) and continued tracking the creature or creatures responsible for the deaths in Rodion. From the networking the Monsterpikes were doing on the forum, the Nighthunters were expecting them and readily accepted their presence and crusade. The Nighthunters were overjoyed to have a real doctor who was in the know accompanying them for as long as Ratchet was willing to stay. Along the way Ratchet learned about other monsters and the kind of variations he could expect. He learned that some few — probably one in every ten thousand — Empties could think and plan and pretend to be living mechs, at least for short spurts of time. He learned about Lamiae enclaves, and how to recognize a flesh eater swarm gravesite. Sparkeaters became less mysterious too, though demystifying them just made them seem more dangerous to Ratchet.

Somewhere along the way, Ironhide finally stopped denying they were fighting monsters. Ratchet was too grateful to be alive after several close calls to say “I told you so” until long after the fact.

The monster, which the more he learned about it the more Ratchet was convinced it was both a sparkeater and the real Mother of Empties, changed cities six more times and switched between the inner city and the slums within those cities at  _ least _ a dozen more before Ratchet finally caught up with it. He’d been following it — off and on between periodic returns to his clinic in Rodion — for close to ten years. His hunt had its own  _ board _ on the investigators’ forum now, complete with an empty “Results” thread waiting to be filled with either his success or his epitaph. His rank was no longer “recruit”; Wombattalion334972 was an “officer”, though he’d avoiding taking on any sort of admin role on the forum itself. Instead, he racked up his post count on the supernatural and mundane first aid threads on the new medical board and provided whatever instruction he could to the groups or individuals he ended up working with.

“So do you think the nest will actually be occupied this time?” Ironhide asked as they made final preparations for their latest attempt. His arsenal (and Ratchet’s, to be honest) had expanded significantly over the past decade, and he always cleaned each piece before a raid. “One of these days someone should put money on it.”

Ratchet snorted. “Because betting our lives isn’t enough?”

“Sure, but if our lives are already on the line, why  _ not  _ add money?”

“Watch it. You’re starting to sound like Smokescreen.” Not a good thing in Ratchet’s view, though the hopeless gambler had been an excellent resource while they’d been hunting in Polyhex two cities ago. 

“I liked Smokescreen.” Ironhide’s massive canon went into his subspace and he started checking over his tricked out scattershot slug thrower. Scattershot weapons were kind of the standard for modern hunters, at least insomuch as the loose collection of groups, roaming individuals, and backwoods survivalists could be said to have a standard. Ratchet liked them, anyway. They were closer range than most energy weapons, but the shot tore up the not-always-living flesh in ways that blasters just couldn’t, and they could switch out the shells for custom ammunition for different things. Salt, for example, affected flesh eaters more than lead or steel shot did. No one knew why for sure. Something about salt being used in purifying bodies before burial in some now forgotten ancient ritual was the prevalent guess.

No one on the forum had managed to  _ kill _ a sparkeater yet, but in the last decade more survivor accounts and hunter run-ins had been added to the data pile. Electrum was the salt for sparkeaters. Hopefully. Acquiring electrum scattershot cartridges had been  _ fragging expensive _ and Ratchet didn’t want to pump four shots into the thing and find it was less effective than plain lead would have been.

“Who’s Smokescreen?” their latest guide/back up/partner asked. Cliffjumper was a member of Shields of Primus, Simfur’s relatively small but highly dedicated hunter cell, and had been working with them since their arrival in the city. “Someone on the Resource?”

“You might know him as  _ Cards_vs_Creatures,” _ Ratchet told him. “He knows his stuff, I’ll give him that, but we clashed a bit in the personality department.”

“Hopefully we can message him when we’re done here and let him know how it went.” Ironhide checked his machete. No electrum coating ( _ waaaay _ too expensive) on either Ironhide or Ratchet’s blades, but Smokescreen had found a small spell that was supposed to be effective against sparkeaters and put them in contact with an etcher who’d engraved it on the weapons. The sun and moons, to drive back the void.

Their target building was a medium sized house in Simfur’s outskirts. Simfur had no wall, so the sprawling streets became suburbs instead of slums, and an automated rail system helped mechs get around without causing too much traffic. The Shields had had the house surrounded (albeit at a distance) since sunrise. No one had come or gone that they’d seen. Ratchet didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one.

The Mother of Empties had been here for several years, if all of his accumulated information was at all useful. Hopefully being so settled meant this was a territory it’d try and defend rather than disappear again.

“I hope this works,” Ratchet muttered. He wasn’t quite to the point of praying to any of the gods for success, but he had  _ plenty _ of holy oil. “Let’s go.”

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get it? Electrum scattershot ammo = tentacle piercing. ┬┴┬┴┤(･_├┬┴┬┴ 
> 
> Happy Halloween. Sleep well tonight. XD


	28. "They Won't Hurt You"

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“Come on out,” Prowl crooned, squirming through the slick passages and unstable rubble. He stabbed his blades into the rock to anchor himself, dug his claws into hand holds a mech could never grip. “Nothing’s going to hurt you.”  _ Except me! _

“Don’t believe you,” came the weak, partially muffled response. Prowl wasn’t sure how far Jazz had fallen, but it had certainly sounded like a good distance. “And I’m already hurt.”

“No hunters, no priests,” Prowl sing-songed back, shimmying down the long-abandoned mineshaft. “No holy water, no floods, no harsh light of the sun. Just a little bit of climbing.”

“Toward a bundle of bladed tentacles? No thank you!” There was a bit of shuffling at the bottom, briefly revealing a flicker of bleeding purple.

“They won’t hurt you,” Prowl lied, suppressing a growl. Of all the times for Jazz to develop a semblance of self-preservation instinct! “I’m just trying to help you out of the hole. The cold, dark,  _ empty _ hole. No prey, no music. Nothing to fight or frag or eat…”

The cold, dark, Empty hole whimpered.

“It’s hard to imagine just how long this place has been abandoned, even for us,” Prowl mused. He was almost at the bottom and then he could stab Jazz and haul him up like dead weight. He just needed to keep the Empty from fleeing deeper into the mining complex. “Long enough for erosion and surface reshaping to completely cover it. Neither of us knew it was here until you fell. Imagine how long it might take for someone else to find you. You could be down here forever~”

The whimpering took on a more desperate note. “I don’t want to be here forever! I’ll lose my mind — literally!” A true misery for Jazz, who prided himself on both his paint and his personality. “…help?” 

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last forty minutes,” Prowl growled, his patience snapping. “Come here!” Just a few more inches…

Jazz squirmed. The pile of rubble shifted and Prowl finally saw him clearly. He stabbed down into the Empty’s torso and hooked his blades securely into his armor and dead internals to haul him back up.

“Aaahhgk!” Purple ichor rained down on Prowl as he maneuvered Jazz past him so he was above him. He was  _ not  _ going through all that again if he managed to squirm free! 

Climbing up was more difficult than going down had been. He was fighting Jazz’s wriggling, struggling weight and he had fewer tentacles to anchor himself with, but eventually he pushed Jazz up through the opening and hauled himself over the edge. 

He flicked Jazz off his blades and sent him tumbling into a broken minecart,  _ well _ away from the abandoned mineshaft! 

“There,” he mocked. “Totally painless. Just like I promised.”

“Ow. Ow, ow, owwww,” Jazz protested the rough treatment. He flailed pathetically in the cart in an attempt to crawl out of it, only to slide back to the bottom with a curse. “You’re a liar. A lying liar who lies.”

“Yes I am,” Prowl admitted. “Besides, I thought you  _ liked _ pain.” He investigated the cart himself. It was definitely broken. He doubted it would roll anywhere. He pushed it experimentally and it dragged on the locked wheels. Good enough. He didn’t want to carry the whining Empty until they found the next village and got something to eat. 

“When I  _ want  _ to be in pain. Which I did not today, thank you very much.” Claws scrabbled again at the sides of the cart, then stopped when it didn’t accomplish anything. “Stupid fragging mine shaft.”

“The gods care not for the suffering of those who have turned from them,” Prowl said philosophically. “You’re probably the only Empty to  _ ever exist _ that has someone care if you suffer.” He pushed the cart. It moved forward, creating furrows in the dirt then caught on a rock. Cursing, Prowl shoved it harder, sending cart and its occupant tumbling violently down a shallow hill covered in thorny crystals. Not  _ exactly _ what he’d wanted, but it worked. He shrugged and followed. Jazz yelped and cried the whole way down, then landed at the bottom and whimpered pathetically.

This was going to be more fun a trip than he’d thought.

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	29. Fuck-or-die Tentacle Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one gets a little heavy into the gore and mutilation, fyi. The prompt went and specifed tentacle sex again and this time added in “fuck-or-die” so you know it’s going to get bad…

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Having a hunting partner had its perks. Prowl hadn’t eaten so well in… well, ever, really. The Empty’s voracious appetite meant taking a lot more prey than the sparkeater actually needed to sustain himself and he had to admit, he enjoyed the excess. It was nice, too, having a ready outlet for some of that excess in the form of a toy that could take a lot of punishment, writhing and screaming in all the best ways while still somehow begging for more.

What he _ didn’t _ enjoy was the way Jazz insisted on playing with his food. The sheer number of victims and the mess he made of them meant they couldn’t stay in one place for any real length of time without bringing on the torches and pitchforks. Sure, Prowl had the energy to keep moving from lair to lair thanks to the abundant hunting, but he was _ tired _of it. 

Keeping him as a pet was a lot more effort than he’d anticipated. 

And just where _ was _ the fragging Empty? He was supposed to have been back by now! Idly he imagined ways he could keep the cretin out of trouble between hunts. A leash was an attractive image, but Jazz could reach it and had his own claws. He’d just escape it when he got bored. Which meant restraining him really meant restraining his _ hands. _ Prowl thought lovingly of just snapping the struts and then letting them hang off Jazz’s arms uselessly while he tried to paw at the leash and collar, but right now Jazz was seducing their prey. Prowl really shouldn’t do _ too _ much visible damage to him… at least not unless it’d heal right away. 

Maybe next time they moved, when Jazz’s social skills weren’t so integral to their success…

The door slammed open. Prowl started, looking up, but wasn’t truly panicked. The intruder had no spark. 

The “intruder” was Jazz. “So… um… help?” He scrambled under the bed of their current lair. 

More sparks filled the hallway, and Prowl started hearing the yelling of the pursuing mob. With a snarl, he yanked the Empty out from under the bed and fled out the window without opening it first. 

“What the frag did you do, you imbecile?”

“Nothing! …much,” Jazz said, clinging to Prowl’s plating like an undead barnacle. “She said her creators weren’t going to be home until it got dark. I thought I had plenty of time!”

Prowl could imagine the rest. He shook Jazz angrily, almost threatening to drop him to the streets below where the mob had gathered around the building and were pointing up at them. 

“Ah! No, please, please don’t drop me!” Jazz clung tighter, claws digging into Prowl’s armor. “They’ll kill me!”

Prowl pried the claws off his plating. “And what makes you think I _ won’t?” _

Still, he wanted to get away from the mob too, before they dug out the crossbows or started flinging holy water at them. He leaped to the next roof and then the next, easily outpacing the mortals below even burdened as he was.

He didn’t come down off the roofs until he ran out of houses, then he hauled Jazz deep enough into the forest surrounding the village that the mechs would hesitate to pursue them before he forcefully pried the Empty the rest of the way off of him and threw him against the nearest tree. Crystal cracked and shattered with a _ krrsshht! _

Growling, he advanced, baring teeth and claws and blades. This wasn’t worth it. That had been a _ good lair. _ They could have stayed there for _ months _ at least if this cretin hadn’t messed it up for them. 

Jazz shrank back into the wrecked tree. “Am I in trouble?”

“You cost me _ another _ perfectly good hunting ground,” Prowl hissed out between his bared teeth. “Again!” He pounced, ripping into the Empty to get at the empty spark chamber. 

“I’msorryIswearIwon’tdoitagain!” Jazz’s voice spiraled up into a truly delightful shriek of terror. “No! Stop! I don’t have a spark for you to eat!”

“I’m going to see how many pieces I need to rip you into before they stop twitching!”

Panic flared purple in Jazz’s visor. “Pieces can’t scream,” he tried desperately. “I’ll scream for you all you want as long as you don’t kill me!”

Prowl tossed away the dead chest plating and paused. There was that. And the screaming — and _ begging _ to be hurt — was one of the things Prowl really did like about Jazz. His tentacles writhed around him, threatening and thinking while Jazz continued to babble. 

“Please, I’ll do whatever you want, I’ll— you can peel off the outer layer of my armor one inch at a time, you can rip out my lines and strangle me with them, stab me with your tentacles and make me frag myself on them—!”

“You’re the one who likes to frag,” Prowl countered, but he backed off and let Jazz fall to his knees. He liked the idea that Jazz would _ hurt himself _ for his entertainment and amusement. So he wouldn’t die, of course, but Prowl could always kill him later. He leaned against the tree indolently and arrayed his tentacles around his victim. “Go ahead and _ enjoy yourself,” _ he commanded. “We’ll see if you manage to be entertaining enough to keep.”

“I will,” Jazz promised, trembling as he reached for the nearest blade and nuzzled it so it cut his cheek. He winced at the pain, then resolutely kept going, slicing up the side of his own face with a series of shallow cuts. “Thank you thank you thank you.”

Prowl licked his teeth and lips with his long, prehensile tongue, optics riveted to the wounds, listening to the moans and gasps of pain. Oh yesss. He was really going to do it. He was going to do _ all _ of it… 

It was fascinating to watch the different ways Jazz came up with to hurt himself too. Prowl wouldn’t have thought of slowly shaving away the edges of Jazz’s armor to round out all of his shapes one piece at a time. Each tiny curl of metal that fell away to rust on the ground was accompanied by whimper, a sob, a desperate plea as Jazz slowly, methodically mutilated his own frame. At one point he took one of the blades into his mouth, licking and sucking on it like he would a spike while he carved away his own armor with another. 

He split his tongue in half on it when he positioned himself over yet another tentacle and sank down on it without bothering to slide back his modesty panel, allowing the blades to stab into the metal and rip it away when he rose back up with an agonized squeal.

Prowl licked his teeth again, purring his approval. “Are you enjoying yourself, pet?” he cooed sadistically. He didn’t bother undulating his tentacle or doing anything else to give his pet any sort of stimulation. Jazz was doing all the work, torturing himself for his master’s pleasure, and Prowl wasn’t sure he’d seen anything so perfect that wasn’t a terrified spark pulsing at the end of his tongue.

Jazz gurgled an affirmative, unable to speak around the blade in his mouth and the glowing ichor choking his throat. He let go of the tentacle he’d been using to cut himself up and moved so two of them were at his back juuuuust at the right height and angle to dig into his shoulders whenever he lifted himself away from the tentacle shredding up his valve. Then he began to rock back and forth, fragging himself in earnest just as he’d said he would while wet, ugly sobs bubbled up and streamed down his face.

Prowl smiled and watched, in absolutely no hurry to step in and stop what was happening. 

The moon was setting by the time he pulled his tentacles back and flicked the gore from them imperiously. Suddenly bereft of the support they had been providing him as he had continued to rip himself apart on them, Jazz sagged into the rather large puddle of his own ichor with a groan of mingled pain and relief. Prowl ignored the sound and plucked him up by the back of his neck like he weighed nothing. 

“Come on. It’ll be dawn soon and those villagers’ll come searching as soon as the sun’s out.” 

Jazz’s feet twitched like he was trying to walk, but otherwise he hung limply from Prowl’s claws — utterly wrecked, but alive to see another day.

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	30. Tentacle Hurt/Comfort

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More character death…

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“There’s a good pet…” 

There were claws. Stroke, stroke… nice claws. It was a… a stimulus. It didn’t distract from the sip-sip of nearly-dead energon through his siphon. He twitched the bladed clamp on the end, but there was no line to clamp down on, just a shallow pool of liquid cupped in inedible fingers. 

“Does it still hurt?” the voice cooed. “I thought you’d had enough to heal most of the damage. Just a few more victims to get rid of the rust and you’ll be as good as new.” Long, feathery stroke of claws, the firm grip of tentacles that kept him from lunging for the dying mech at their feet, keeping him sip-sipping from the hand.

Prowl. The voice, the hand, the tentacles. Those were Prowl. And…

And…

And…

“Let go,” Prowl commanded, working his fingers free of the clamp that had grasped his fingers as the pool of energon ran low. Vision blinked. He was glad Prowl had worked himself free because he didn’t know how to obey yet. 

The siphon wiggled in the air, clamp flexing, straining towards the living victim. Held fast. 

“Here you go, Jazz,” Prowl crooned, offering another handful of fuel from the mech’s wounds. “Time to wake up.”

Jazz. He was Jazz. 

And he was  _ hungry.  _ He wanted that body… but that wasn’t how this worked, was it? Fighting Prowl wouldn’t get him the fuel.

It wasn’t the easiest way to feed, sipping fuel from Prowl’s hand like this. There wasn’t enough of it to truly submerge the end of his siphon and get a proper suction going, but as awareness, thoughts, memories began slowly materializing from the gaping black emptiness inside him, Jazz remembered there was a better way.

He didn’t know how many handfuls later it was, but eventually he had the presence of mind to counterintuitively retract his siphon so he could more readily lick the fuel off Prowl’s fingers.

“Are you going to be a good pet and  _ stay _ if I let you go?” Prowl’s tentacles shifted around him. “Holding you is tedious.” 

Stay. Prowl said that when he didn’t want him to move, so he must want him to stay where he was and not lunge for the body. Could he do that? He could probably do that, as long as Prowl kept feeding him. “Mmhmm,” he hummed against Prowl’s fingers, consciously relaxing his frame. See? Not going to bolt! 

The tentacles unwound and one even petted up Jazz’s back as it withdrew. Prowl offered him another handful of fuel. “Good pet.”

Good pet. Those were good words. Jazz liked those words, and as he drank he replayed them in his mind. As long as Prowl called him that he  _ probably  _ wouldn’t drop him and leave him still aching and rusting and  _ empty  _ on the floor of the… of the… where were they, anyway?

Jazz blinked and took the moment while Prowl refilled his hand with fuel to look around. The completely metal hallway gleamed in the dull red emergency lights. Several stasis pods gaped open, empty, while more were still sealed behind them. The pile of corpses was expected — it would have taken more than one mech’s fuel to bring him back up from mindless — but several looked like they had been Empties before Prowl ripped them to pieces. 

Jazz didn’t mourn his… spawn? They would have just eaten  _ his _ prey. 

“Drink,” Prowl told him, offering his hand, and Jazz’s attempts to figure out where they were fled in the face of the offer of fuel, meager as it was. 

Now that he didn’t struggle, that he  _ stayed _ like a good pet, Prowl’s other hand and his tentacles were gentle, teasing, caressing. It created the illusion — and it  _ was  _ an illusion, Jazz knew, but it was a nice one — that Prowl cared about him. Besides, it  _ wasn’t  _ an illusion that he was physically taking care of him right now. Those pods weren’t something he could have gotten into on his own without the ability to think, which meant Prowl had opened them for him.

Yeah, yeah, he’d probably really opened them for himself, but that didn’t mean he had to share. The scattered bits of other (former) Empties were proof of that. And yet here he was, sharing! And petting, and praising… Jazz sighed happily as he drank.

The fuel slowed to a trickle and with a firm “Stay”, Prowl finished ripping their prey open and swallowed its spark. He kicked the corpsed over to join the others as he stood, then went to the nearest still-sealed pod. Blinking, Jazz watched. He expected Prowl to tear it open, but he fiddled with the controls and it opened smoothly. 

A handsome blue mech with turbowolf ears and a tail and an animalistic face stumbled out. He shivered, regained his footing on digitigrade legs that ended in large claw-like feet. He looked around, yellow optics disoriented, but he caught on that this wasn’t a rescue quickly. He started to fight… and was perfunctorily stabbed through the chest and tossed over to Jazz. 

The wound oozed temptingly, and Jazz started to lean down to drink, then stopped himself. 

“Good pet,” Prowl praised, kneeling back down and filling his hand with the wolf-mech’s fuel. The prey growled and snapped his teeth at the clawed hand digging in his wound, but Prowl just pinned him to the floor with two blades through his shoulders to keep him still. He offered the fuel to Jazz. 

“Thhannnnk youuu,” Jazz said, his vocalizer rasping with slowly-healing rust. This mech didn’t have enough fuel to finish repairing him after… how long  _ had  _ he been shambling around this time? Meh. Fuel first, musings later. Lots and lots of fuel, because he was burning it off almost faster than Prowl was letting him take it in with those repairs.

“You’re starting to get your stripes again,” Prowl mused, scratching lightly with one blade at the rust on Jazz’s chest. “You’re healing quickly, for six million years neglect.”

Six mi— “Whhat?” Jazz looked up, licking his lips as he tried to parse the number. That was a  _ big  _ number. He didn’t remember Prowl saying anything like that when they’d first boarded— right! This was a prison ship, the  _ Alchemor.  _ “Youuu trick-k-kt me,” he accused. 

Prowl shrugged his doors and offered him another handful of fuel, totally unrepentant. “It was only a generation this time. I intended it to be longer, but we were found. Tomb robbers, of course,” he answered before Jazz could finish licking his fingers clean and ask. “Some things are universal, even in space.”

Ugh. Seriously? He’d pulled the fragging tomb trick again? “Lemme guesss. They didn’t survive?”

“I saved the last one for you.” Prowl caressed him gently under the visor before retrieving another handful of energon.  _ “And _ dipped into our supplies to revive you fully and restore your shine.”

Awww, he had? Jazz smiled and drank, nuzzling Prowl’s hand in the process. He liked being shiny! And if Prowl was bothering to indulge him in a full recovery, then their stay in the tomb/ship wasn’t just interrupted, it was over. 

Prowl didn’t say anything else. He finished feeding Jazz and ripped open the wolf-mech to eat the spark. “Here. You can frag this one.” He tossed the corpse to Jazz. “I’m going to investigate the scavengers’ ship and find out more about when we are now.”

“Just this one?” Jazz looked hopefully at the other pods. He  _ still _ didn’t know how to open them, and he remembered trying, and failing, to scratch into them himself. “They’re more fun when they’re still alive.”

“You’re going to quibble after a six million year dry spell?” Prowl mocked, his tentacles trailing after him as he left Jazz there with the pile of corpses. “I didn’t  _ have _ to wake you up…”

“Wasn’t quibbling! Just asking,” Jazz said quickly, because no, he wasn’t going to complain after Prowl woke him up instead of just going back into hibernation. He just also couldn’t help pressing his luck. “What do you want me to do when I’m done?”

“Start cleaning!” Prowl called back. 

Bleh. “He’s so bossy,” Jazz said to the corpse as he climbed on top of it. “Guess I better make this last.”

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	31. Accidental Tentacles

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Prowl… _ prowled _ through the dark streets between clay buildings. He was hungry and this was a good hunting ground. It was where he’d settled in for the first time since being freed from the tomb and he’d been in this town for over a year. Things were very different now than when he’d been sealed away. He remembered a time when prayers had been etched into every surface of every structure. By comparison, the descendants of those cautious mechs were lax with their protections. The living gods — Prima and Solus and even Megatronus — had abandoned them to their fates. 

That didn’t mean Prowl could easily enter the houses. Prayers _ were _ still stamped above doors and windows where they had been imprinted before the clay hardened into stone. Sometimes, though, the rain ate away at them and Prowl could enter and eat well. Those houses made great lairs, and he could stay in them usually for several weeks before being forced out by neighbors curious why they hadn’t seen their friends in a while.

When he couldn’t find a new, vulnerable house, he simply prowled the streets, looking for strays, outcasts and the unafraid. Like he was doing now, though he did have a lair waiting for him to return to at the moment. 

He passed up the busy thoroughfares and headed to the ambush spot he’d chosen: a sidestreet that connected the busy lantern district with the quieter shops and houses. No one had passed by to be ambushed there for over a week, but Prowl was determined. It was a good spot, and when the prey came he would be ready for it.

Just when he thought he would need to wait another day, one of the many mechs walking around the district turned onto his street. Solitary footsteps echoed down the alley as he unknowingly approached his death.

Prowl looked him over as he came into sight. A small, thin mech with a small, wheeled alternate form. Idly he thought that he would have preferred someone bulky and strong, with a larger frame and decorative accents more like his own… but this was the first prey that had come this way since he’d chosen this ambush spot. Beggars, as the saying went, couldn’t be choosers. 

He licked his lips as the prey came closer… _ closer… _ He pounced!

Claws latched onto the mech’s armor and pulled him into a nearby open cellar before he could cry out or react. Once inside, Prowl let him go so he could slam the door shut, throwing the dark room into even deeper darkness. 

“W-who’s there?” the mech asked, fumbling blindly in the confined space. He jumped back when he bumped into Prowl, optics flaring wildly. “Is it money you want? I’ll give you everything I have, just please let me go.”

Money was useful, yes, but Prowl would just take it off of his corpse. Unhindered by the darkness, honing in on his prey’s spark more than any physical vision, Prowl circled around until he was in front of the mech, close enough to touch. 

He pounced again. This time he sent them both to the floor and stabbed two tentacles into the prey’s chest plating. With a twist and a squeal of metal to match the shriek from the mech’s vocalizer he ripped the armor away, exposing the chamber. He could _ taste _ the rapid sparkpulse, savor the panic as his victim sobbed and begged.

He had taken many, many prey before. He was no novice. But he hesitated now. He was hungry, yes, but now that he had his victim — private, hidden — another impulse gripped him.

Feed. Defile. _ Propagate. _

What was happening?

“P-please, please, oh Primus, spare me!” A harsh invent warned Prowl his victim was about to scream and he lashed out, claws closing around its neck and crushing its vocalizer… _ carefully, _of all things. The new, unfamiliar impulse had him in an iron grip, preventing him from killing.

_ This one will do nicely. _

Nicely for what, Prowl both did and did not understand. He crooned a harsh, screeching note and coiled his tentacles around himself. He looked into the prey’s optics and he _ wanted _ to eat it. 

Instead, something at the base of his tentacles detached from his frame. It felt moist and soft as it slithered along. Feeling some sort of pleasure, and even satisfaction — _it was happening —_ in the sensation, he coiled his tentacles to help the thing along. Yess… Prowl wasn’t sure _ what _ was happening, but right now he wanted it as much as he had any spark between his jaws. 

The thing crept inexorably closer to its goal, slowly edging along Prowl’s tentacle until it was in his field of vision. They paused to examine each other. Prowl could feel the strange, seething mass of dark magic and tiny tentacles looking at him and wondered what it saw. Something about it seemed to skirt Prowl’s optics even when he looked directly at it, defying description. It glistened, though there was no light to reflect, like a sheen of slime. 

Itty bitty tentacles unwrapped from around Prowl’s and reached for the prey, stretching itself into translucence, then shadow, then nothing as it strained towards its first spark. Hungry little thing. 

Tilting his head, unsure why he was giving up _ his _ prey to this tiny, otherworldly thing, Prowl lowered it into their victim’s chest. With the exterior armor already torn away, there was nothing to impede it from reaching the spark chamber and oozing its way inside.

_ It is done! _

Prowl released the prey — the host — and stepped back. Its optics were flickering fitfully, sputtering and dimming as its spark was slowly consumed. There was nothing more for Prowl to do here. It was time to leave, to seal it in the dark until it rose.

He flipped the host over and saw that already there were little shadows of tentacles sprouting from its back. The creature, larva, had moved in and was making itself at home.

Snarling, he tossed the new… new _ sparkeater _ to the wall where it fell into a heap and pushed a stack of crates over to hide it from view. Then, thoroughly disgusted by the whole unexpected affair — and still _ hungry, _ damn it all! — he stalked out of the cellar and slammed the door shut. He would hunt somewhere else tonight, but he was _ not _ going to share _ his _territory with the thing when it emerged. 

Whatever that had been, Prowl heartily hoped it wouldn’t be a common occurrence.

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It was going to happen again. 

Prowl glared at the computer screen in front of him, hating the gentle squirming at his back. The newly-formed larva wasn’t quite ready to detach, but already he could feel it pressing him to find a secure place to stash it and its future host. It wasn’t going to be easy this time; in addition to the threat that was Jazz and his insistence on eating any and everything that came into the house, they had hunters closing in on them — in the city right now, in fact, according to the forum.

Two could play at this game, after all.

It had taken an embarrassingly long time to catch on and access the forum himself. He knew these world-connections existed in these sorts of eras — it took more effort to move into a nice house than simply killing off the previous owners, for instance — but it wasn’t until the fourth (fifth?) time that pesky hunter from Rodion had caught up with them that he’d thought that he could use the network too. It had taken even longer to keep his focus long enough to actually do so. About the time he was stealing Delirium’s identity so that he could use it, and the mech’s bank assets, to buy this house, in fact. 

He consoled himself over the delay with the fact that he’d needed an email address before he could sign into the Paranormal Investigators’ forum, and he’d needed the identity before he could sign up for the email.

Curious what their next move would be, he opened the “Mother of Empties” board to check the status of the hunt and peruse the profiles of the hunters. 

“Messing with that thing again?”

Prowl clicked another profile and ignored Jazz.

Jazz, of course, didn’t take the hint. “You already checked it this morning. What more is there to see?”

Feed. Defile. Propagate.

Propagation precluded feeding, but if Prowl had to do it then he thought he should get _ something _ out of it. He hadn’t always managed, but if he could combine propagation with defilement he’d at least come out even in the exchange. And what sort of defilement could be better than to change one of the ones hunting him, as Megatronus had changed him? Prowl did not feel the need for revenge, precisely, but there was a certain amount of vindication in the thought.

_ A good sturdy frame that could hold down its victims, ornaments like his own… _ It had been a long time, an age, nearly an eternity, since chevrons had been the mark of a priest or holy warrior, but he still liked the thought.

“I’m picking one,” Prowl answered Jazz absently, scrolling through the profiles until he found the one he wanted, the one that had followed them across the planet. Wombattalion334972. _ Ratchet. _

Of course the mech’s true name wasn’t here on the forum, but Prowl remembered it from Rodion. He could still… he pulled up the employee registry for the slum hospital where the mech still worked. Looked at the profile picture. 

The thing developing on his back stirred gently. _We like him... _

“Oh, hey, I noticed that earlier. Did you know you have another—”

Prowl’s tentacles tensed. “Yes, I know,” he growled as Jazz stepped <strike>frustratingly</strike> wisely out of range. “Would you like me to dismember you now to save time?”

“No! No, no need to dismember anything.” Prowl could practically hear Jazz craning his neck to see the computer screen without coming any closer. “So when you say you’re picking one, you mean for… that.”

“I’m going to rip your tongue out and shove it down your siphon if you don’t _ drop it,” _ he hissed. Maybe it was irrational to be upset by something he couldn’t stop, something he even found pleasure in, but he hated it. He didn’t _ want _ another sparkeater running around _ his _ territory, eating _ his _ food! 

“If you want the medic can I have,” Jazz peered at the list of hunters, _ “Leap_don’t_look _ to play with? That sounds like a mech that knows how to party!”

“Sure.” Why not? “I can leave you both to rot in the closet together.”

Angrily Prowl clicked away from forum, away from Ratchet's profile and his contemplation of his future progeny, and over to one of his more entertaining projects. 

“Aww. Boring!” Jazz let out a huff. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what the computer was or how it could be used, but the lack of physical stimulus meant it held very little interest for him. “How much longer are you going to keep that up? We— _You _ could have eaten him _ weeks _ago!”

Prowl rolled his optics. “Except that Acidscraps lives in Kaon and we’re in Simfur." Out of physical reach. "But he’s been planning a trip out to meet up with _ Baby-Blue _ and he arrives tonight. No one will even realize he’s gone for a week and after that, once his perversions have been discovered, no one will _ care _ that he got himself killed pursuing them.” Low lifes were so much easier to get away with killing, and the day he’d figured out he could make them _ come to him _ without leaving his lair had been one of the better days of his unlife. “I’m arranging to meet up with him at the,” dark, secluded, “park now.”

“Oh?” And just like that, Jazz was interested again. “Can I come?”

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> /flop
> 
> That's all she wrote, guys. It was great having you along for some truly horrific fun.


End file.
